Social Dreaming, Associative Thinking and Intensities of Affect

"This book is innovative in using Deleuze and Guattari's affect theory to provide an onto-epistemological basis for the Social Dreaming method. It works powerfully and its range is huge. A much-needed paradigm for encountering the anthropocene."- Wendy Hollway, Emeritus Professor in Psychology, Open University, UK This book describes a way of sharing dreams in a group, called 'social dreaming'. It explores how the sharing of real, night time dreams, in a group, can offer information on and insight into ourselves and the worlds we live in and share. It investigates how we can turn dream images, and ideas and feelings that arise from these images, into conscious thought, before describing the ways in which these can be used. Using a background of the psychosocial combined with a philosophical lens influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Julian Manley shows how social dreaming can be understood as a Deleuzian 'rhizome of affects', a web or a rootdesign where things interconnect in a random and spontaneous fashion rather than in a sequential or linear way. He illustrates how social dreaming can link dreams together into a collage of images, and compares this to the rhizome, where clusters of emotional intensity - which emerge from the dream images - weave and interconnect with other clusters, forming a web of interlinked dream images and emotions. From the basis of this rhizome emerges an interpretation of social dreaming as a 'body without organs' and the social dreaming matrix as a 'smooth space' where meanings emerge from the way these images form connections, and come and go according to our emotions at any particular moment.

Autorentext

Julian Manley is a Research Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

Zusammenfassung

This book describes a way of sharing dreams in a group, called 'social dreaming'. It explores how the sharing of real, night time dreams, in a group, can offer information on and insight into ourselves and the worlds we live in and share. It investigates how we can turn dream images, and ideas and feelings that arise from these images, into conscious thought, before describing the ways in which these can be used. Using a background of the psychosocial combined with a philosophical lens influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Julian Manley shows how social dreaming can be understood as a Deleuzian 'rhizome of affects', a web or a root design where things interconnect in a random and spontaneous fashion rather than in a sequential or linear way. He illustrates how social dreaming can link dreams together into a collage of images, and compares this to the rhizome, where clusters of emotional intensity which emerge from the dream images weave and interconnect with other clusters, forming a web of interlinked dream images and emotions. From the basis of this rhizome emerges an interpretation of social dreaming as a 'body without organs' and the social dreaming matrix as a 'smooth space' where meanings emerge from the way these images form connections, and come and go according to our emotions at any particular moment.

Inhalt
Foreword by Lita Crociani-Windland.PART I Social dreaming: origins, history and practice.Chapter 1: Introduction.Chapter 2. A brief history and background of social dreaming.Chapter 3. From group relations to the social dreaming matrix.PART II Deleuzian approaches.- Chapter 4. Social Dreaming in a New Key.Chapter 5. From thinking linearity to feeling non-linearity.Chapter 6. The social dreaming collage and the Deleuzian rhizome.Chapter 7. Becoming dream: the dis-embodied/ embodied experience of social dreaming.PART III From data to new thinking.Chapter 8. Processing social dreaming material as data.Chapter 9. A Case Study: Slow Violence: Art, climate change and social dreaming.Chapter 10. Combining the internal virtual of the matrix dream space with external reality: Lessons of chaos and complexity.Chapter 11. Expressing the virtual and the image-affect: The problem of language.Chapter 12 Disembodiment, embodiment and the image-affect.Chapter 13 A note on post- Lawrence research on social dreaming.Chapter 14 Using the virtual for the real.Chapter 15 The final plateau.Chapter 16 Concluding.