Years ago, I worked as the member of a regional Chief Information Officer’s staff unit for a large international financial services corporation. The complexity of international matrix management led my to work with a management consult who had been schooled in the Group Relations tradition of Wilfred Bion.

Through this, I became acquainted with the work of W. Gordon Lawrence on Social Dreaming. I participated in several social dreaming matrices, some of which where online. In a social dreaming matrix, people would share their dreams and others would share their associations to the dream. You will note that I said associations, not interpretations. The idea is not arrive at some sort of group consensus about the interpretation of a specific dream but to uncover common themes in the dreams of all the participants and what these common themes might mean to everyone.

I have not thought about social dreaming in a while. My life has been busy and complicated and I haven’t been to any social dreaming matrixes in quite a while. For that matter, I have not been remembering a lot of my dreams.

Then, last night, I had a very vivid dream. I woke up from the dream with a sense of peace that I haven’t had in a long time. I am posting the dream here, for anyone to share associations with, including comments about similar dreams that they have had. If there is interest, this could even evolve into a blog based social dreaming matrix. I look forward to hearing people’s responses.

The Dream:

I am at some sort of an arts festival. The space is like a convention center or major indoor stadium. There is music at the main stage and crafts around the side. I have the feeling that it is somewhere like San Francisco. I am there with many of my friends from online activist technology.

One friend of mine has a crafts table where she is selling canvas shirts with wonderful paintings on them. I think about how great it would be to provide unpainted canvas shirts with paints as a clean slate for painting.

As I walked around, I found myself outside climbing a hill. It is similar to the hill I used to go blueberry picking on as a kid, which is very similar to the hill where Sal goes blueberry picking with her mother in the book Blueberries for Sal.

As I got over the hill I encountered the most beautiful vistas I had ever seen. I am overwhelmed with an incredible sense of peace. I was looking out over a peaceful sea. It was crystal clear and colored a sort of green that the sea isn’t normally, not quite emerald. There are no people anywhere around.

In the dream I knew that I was dreaming. I looked around behind me and saw large cats peeking out of the bushes like the famous Rouseau painting. Since I knew it was a dream, I knew that if I wanted they could change to any other fantastical animal I wanted and I watched them change to several other animals.

I walked a little further and found an area where I could easily enter the water. It was like a spa with a ladder to climb down. I was hesitant about climbing down because I knew it was a dream, the water was a strange color, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I entered the water. Nonetheless, I climbed down and the water was beautiful. I felt stress lifting from my body.

I then woke up from my dream within a dream and found myself back and my friend’s apartment. People were arriving back from the festival and I got up and talked with them. In my mind, I was still thinking about the idea of shirts as canvases for painters, and it occurred to me that you could already do this easily with fabric paint and T-shirts. I thought it might be nicer to do this with fabric paint and polo shirts and I thought about getting people on the campaign to make a great collection of artsy campaign shirts.

At this point, the alarm went off and I awoke from my dream.

What sort of associations does this evoke in you?