Social Dreaming our way through the pandemic

On the last Saturday of March 2020 my colleague and long-time mentor Rebekah O’Rourke asked if I would join her to host an online Social Sensing Matrix. It wasn’t a drawn out discussion: she sent me a brief message and I replied ‘yes’; such was the clarity of the invitation.

Why a Matrix?

I was just a couple of weeks into isolation at home in London and felt enraged and exhausted by my own experience and what I was seeing in others. I felt like I had a big, heavy, sweaty beast sitting on top of me. It was as if I could see and speak, but my voice came out as a squeak and I could hardly breathe. I was on the hunt for energising and life-giving explorations and connections.

Rebekah and I share a passion for exploring the messy enmeshments of systems and roles, to venture into the shadows and shocks of our everyday experiences, and to draw links across all domains of life. No subject or experience is off the table in our conversations. A Matrix felt like the kind of spacious, creative, inviting environment for these messy times. 

What is a Matrix?

The practise of Matrix-working demands that we shed the usual social norms and niceties of interacting and cut to the chase of what is real, alive, and present for us in this moment. It doesn’t need to make sense, to be wrapped up in a bow with a clever conclusion or a point to be made; just a simple report out of your here-and-now experience.

It also isn’t a personal or inter-personal analysis or interpretation of dreams or offerings, and it’s not a conversation or dialogue to be facilitated or analysed. Instead it is an open, neutral space to collectively observe the variety of dreams and associations brought forth, and that in of itself is profoundly liberating.

No data is privileged above others; if it’s in your mind and body right now, it’s relevant, real, and rife for exploration. You simply trust that the Matrix will make use of your offering for its purposes, or not.
What could be more grounding and truth-telling than that? 

We’ve held 6 online Social Sensing Matrices (SSM) to date working to this aim:

For the first 45minutes: to share dreams, associations, and reveries, and make links to the emerging context and environment.

For the final 15minutes, we will work with the themes emerging in the Matrix.

Our role as Hosts is to draw attention to the data and themes available, from which participants make links and develop hypotheses – about what is going on, why, and what relevance it might have for them and our world.

What has been happening?

A few weeks in we changed the aim of the final 15 minutes to ‘and make links to our own roles and contexts’.
The night before our first Matrix I dreamt we were co-hosting a group Role Consultation instead. Following that nudge, and given this isn’t a previously formed group, we decided to sharpen our work together by drawing attention back to current roles and lives.

We have different people showing up each week, some we know and some that have been invited in by others, covering these territories: Wales, Ireland, England, Australia, Trinidad & Tobago, Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Bulgaria. Many have participated in SSM’s before, some have not.

Themes so far have included: upgrading and evolving our paradigms; the reversal of the natural order of things; communing across generations, technology, species, and difference. Coming up against barriers and boundaries, seeking old and new exits and pathways, old and new vehicles for transportation and transformation, and getting in touch with what’s old and empty inside of our institutions and ourselves. More recently: discovering new ways of moving, travelling, and engaging from our own sense of agency at a local level, discovering the possibility and resources hiding in plain sight.

What we’re observing

Along with hypotheses we pay attention to the progression of what unfolds. There might be some silence followed by a flurry of seemingly disconnected dreams, ideas, random stories or thoughts shared. Suddenly a pattern or theme becomes visible across the variety of data, and it continues to wind around with the energy of a spiral as the connections emerge and loop back. Participants have no idea how their offering might connect, oppose, blend with, shift, and change the course of our experience together.

We realise that an isolated dream shared at the beginning in hindsight was a gateway into what’s really going on around here, the clarity of which finally reveals itself towards the end.

It is remarkable that we can create such a staggering coherence across our diversity. We are a relatively disconnected group from different roles and contexts, some with previously existing relationships and some with none.

What does this say about the particular quality and nature of our relating that this becomes possible? What consequences could this have for how we work with diversity, difference, and meaning-making? We are dreaming together at a time when structural and cultural inequalities are being revealed, when the diversity of our roles, positions, privileges, and human experiences are illuminated in painfully stark light. The context is always present in the Matrix; the Field the object of study in of itself.

Each week we’re gathering in numbers between 18 – 21. The repeating numbers, despite the group shifting and changing each week, feels representative of being on the boundaries of adulthood, growth and ‘growing up’ and out of the structures of society. That’s certainly the impact the Matrix has on me; I feel able to rise up from whatever fog I’ve been in, to see clearly to the tops of the trees, and feel the strength and integrity in my own ‘backbone’ and spirit. The sweaty heavy beast that oppresses me in these times dissolves and disintegrates.

As Rebekah and I take up our roles as co-Hosts in differentiated ways, we notice that whichever thread we choose to follow, whichever line of data we draw attention to, the same theme is wriggled free from our unconscious. She might be tracking the dynamics in the group of who shares what in which order, from what roles, institutions, countries or demographic, whilst I track the choice of linguistic phrasing and imagery. We end up grasping hold of the same hypothesis and thread at the end of it. 

The Matrix lives up to its name; each part reflects something of the whole, and the whole reflects something back to each part.

As we enter the 7th SSM of this ‘season’, we will begin to gather the experiences of participating members, whether they joined once or have returned each week. We hope to offer up our collective reflections more fully in the spirit of learning about what is emerging in our world/s at this time, what it takes to come together as humans in alive and energising ways, what we can learn about the practises and roles required of Matrix work, and what roles might be mobilised – or not – in each of us in our lives and contexts.

Further reading:

“Developing collective organisational mindfulness: The social sensing matrix”, Rebekah O’Rourke and Patrick Foley