theatre of dreams: social dreaming as ritual/yoga/literature machine

by STEPHEN FITZPATRICK

 

(First published in Experiences in Social Dreaming, Ed. W. G. Lawrence, London: Karnac, 2003. Reprinted with permission of the editor.)

Is not sleep perhaps the true home of the self, like the sea from which mankind first emerged at the dawn of time …? But if that is so, how can man re-enter that other life and yet remain awake enough to know it?
Gabriel Josipovici (1979, p. 4)

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality… to define what is real.
Herbert Marcuse (1977, p. 9)

WHAT IS SOCIAL DREAMING?
I shall try to clear a space and occupy a ground in which this liminal object —social dreaming— can come more clearly into view. To do so I have deliberately “bracketed off” and put aside the putative meanings of any given set of themes made available in any given matrix. I have made this manoeuvre —foregrounding the structural, functional, and experiential/transformational aspects of social dreaming while recessing the epistemological— in order to attend not to the traces left by the process of social dreaming but to the object itself. Furthermore, the eventual process that is social dreaming in fact problematizes any attempt to fix and stabilize meaning(s) generated by matrix. According to this reading of social dreaming, the medium is the message.

In pursuing the experiential matrix, I shall offer an account of social dreaming as a process generative of experiences that, in “deep matrix”, are beyond semiosis and entail ontological modulations of self and world.

This account regards social dreaming not as a therapeutic technology but as a late-modern form of communitarian ritual or social-dream yoga that binds aspects of the self —essentially its personal and interpersonal modes— in order to free others; the self experienced in an impersonal and collective modality. Yet paradoxically this binding or elision of the personal is experienced by participants as a finding of the self, as a deep authentication of selfhood, that is at the same time an immersion or dissolution of the self in the collective.

Central to this analysis of experiential matrix is a discussion of the way in which social dreaming deploys language in extraordinary ways in order to reprocess the subjectivity of participants. (This, of course, assumes the centrality of language as a mediating agent of perception.) This consideration of the uses of language in social dreaming leads to a brief comparison with the uses of language tropes in modernist art practise and theory and their relevance to our under¬standing of the practice of social dreaming.

This chapter is divided into three distinct but related sections. The first section discusses the social dreaming matrix as a transformational object; the second offers an account of transformations in deep matrix in terms of the Buddhist concept of Sunyata or emptiness; and the third consists of a number of tentative hypotheses about the nature and significance of the social dreaming matrix.

THE SOCIAL DREAMING MATRIX AS TRANSFORMATIONAL OBJECT
In a social dreaming matrix, participants access and realize dimensions or aspects of world that would otherwise remain merely latent, recessed, or potential.

In becoming what they only potentially were, the social dreaming matrix effects a rite-of-passage through a series or procession of life-worlds that conform to a succession of reality principles different to, and distinct from, that which is hegemonic in everyday life as it is experienced in extroverted, late-modern, urbanized, technologically enabled Western(-ized) societies.

Social dreaming brings about transformational effects. These dramatic transformations lend to the experience of participation an imaginal kinship with the religious rituals of traditional societies as described and theorized in anthropological accounts of ritual. The speed and profundity of these transformations, their social-participative nature, the states of reverie induced, their air of gravity, and their circumscription in time (one- to three-day events) are distinctive not only of social dreaming but of traditional ritual activity.

But the commonalities go deeper than this: I shall attempt to show that the transformations, the life-worlds, or the states of mind and society realized in social dreaming, generate experiential phenomena that scatter and dissolve subjectivity across a register of intensities so profound that they might properly be characterized as “religious”.

I offer an account of the manner in which these integrations are realized via a procession through a series of life-worlds, which are first realized and then stabilized as states of mind and society by the centrifugal action of the matrix.

THE NUMINOUS
Social dreaming generates experiences that can be most effectively characterized by the philosophical category of the “numinous”, a term coined by Rudolf Otto (1950, p. 7) to capture the experiential, non-discursive, non-rational, and ineffable aspect of religion.

In the state of numinosity, discursive reason —the ordering principle of reality in secular Western society— may not disappear entirely, but, as Rappaport (1999, p. 219) observes, metaphoric representation, primary-process thought, and strong emotion become increasingly important as the domination of syntactic or syllogistic logic, or simple everyday rationality, recedes.

When the numinous is manifest, boundaries shift and shatter, the self overflows, and individuals are transformed, marvelling at a revelation of the hidden oneness of things. But the numinous shows itself according to many faces. This revelation of the hidden faces of the world is accompanied by powerful affects. It is not definitively cognitive.

Otto (1950, p. 36) articulates yet another face of the numinous that is of relevance here: the experience of the numinous may also generate feelings of love and beatitude, experiences that are non-rational, indescribable, and inexpressibly tranquil. Access to the numinous is facilitated in traditional societies by participation in ritual activities:

for most people in most societies… the way to numinous experience is through participation in communitarian ritual, for in communitarian ritual the need for extraordinary sensitivity … or the special exertions to successful vision quest or mediation, regulated by the compelling characteristics of ritual itself, its tempos, its repetitiveness, its union, its strangeness, … drive many, or even most participants from mundane consciousness into numinous experience. [Rappaport, 1999, p. 380]

It is precisely this phenomena — communitas, the collective experience of the numinous—that captures the singular experiences of participants in the social dreaming matrix and that requires that we re-categorize social dreaming not as a therapeutic technology or as an heteredox psychoanalytic school, but as a late-modern form of communitarian ritual or social-dream yoga.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOUR
It is an axiom of this chapter that forms of language imply and are implicated in discrete and distinctive types of relationship, forms of behaviour, and world views. In social dreaming, introverted language use is deployed in an extroverted, social context. Changes of state ensue in the wake of this extraordinary deployment of language.

There is an obvious family resemblance here with the psychoanalytic setting and the withdrawal or separation of the analysand from habitual relatedness and the dominance of extroverted (denotative-referential) language behaviour and the foregrounding of an associative-connotative language behaviour in the form of free association.

In the psychoanalytic setting, withdrawal from ordinary relatedness and the putting into interpersonal space of introverted language behaviours is one of the moves that facilitates the devolution of the ego or false self and the emergence of hitherto unrealized aspects of the self. Social dreaming brings about comparable effects in a social context, but is not defined or exhausted by therapeutic effects and objectives. Social dreaming has more in common with Eastern disciplines, in that the self is “re-ontologized” in order to permit a transition to experiences of selflessness or impersonality in communitas. This extraordinary re-ontologization cannot be captured by a philosophical ontology of the subject that conceives of that subject as distinct from others nor over and against a world from which it is separate and distinct.

The emergence of social dreaming constitutes a new convention— a form of communitarian ritual—establishing a break with psychoanalysis, for here the dream is not transfigured in order to reveal the hidden, but taken at face value, re-inscribed, and redeployed in a new context where it functions as part of a set of techniques (matrix) that serve to realize experience in its impersonal aspect and thereby bring into focus previously occluded and unthematized aspects of reality.

Linguistic messages transmitted in the matrix do not refer to or designate some independently existing ‘‘objective reality” that can be sought out to guarantee the truth or falsehood of statements about, or statements of, this class of statements. The messages —narrated dreams and associations— that constitute the “social dreaming liturgy” are not “denotative” —that is to say, an objective, fixed, and more or less stable referent cannot be assumed. Rather, the messages that constitute the social dreaming liturgy conform to the class of statements designated by Anglo-American analytic philosophy as “performatives” (Austin, 1962): speech acts that are first and foremost actions —they effect transformations or modulations in the real, bringing into being a new state of affairs.

Performatives bring about the state of affairs to which they refer. They are not simply mimetic but invocational. In a performative speech act, the utterance is itself the performance of the language act in question, and not a report of that performance. The utterance of the minister, “I pronounce you man and wife”, spoken in the marriage ceremony, is performative and calls a new state of affairs into being. Rappaport (1999) comments:

to say that performers participate in or become part of the orders they are realising is to say that transmitter-receivers become fused with the messages they are transmitting and receiving. In conforming to the orders that their performers bring into being and that come alive in their performance, performers become indistinguishable from those orders, parts of them, for the time being. [p. 119]

The linguistic messages articulated by participants in a social dreaming matrix are of this type, effecting a separation and rupture with the established reality principle in order to conform to and realize an impersonal order of experience. This impersonal mode, however, is experienced as a paradox: it is both impersonal and yet at the same time a new-found and deep sense of freedom and self-authentification. Rappaport again: “Performatives … are self-fulfilling and make themselves true by standing in a relationship of conformity to the states of affairs with which they are concerned” (Rappaport, 1999, p. 117).

The transformations wrought by social dreaming are an effect of the ways in which meaning is configured and conveyed by the process. The meanings produced in the matrix can be owned by no individual participant —all participate in its making. This polysemous text cannot be claimed or definitively named —it eludes semantic closure, and meaning is indefinitely deferred. The territorialing tendency of the ego-self to define, own, and defend its utterances as private property is refused.

The social dreaming “liturgy” —the messages transmitted and rceived by participants in the matrix— is a co-emergent phenomena, woven by the participants, who are re-inscribed in communitas by the dense allusive patterns of its whorling warp and woof.

THE SOCIAL DREAMING LITURGY: REHEARSING AND REALIZING IMPERSONALITY
Although the meanings generated in any given matrix may differ radically, the form —that is to say, dreams and associations— remains constant. In this sense the messages transmitted and received by participants function in an analogous way to the invariant liturgy of traditional ritual.

As the social dreaming set takes hold, the personal aspects of the participants are gradually refined out of the mise-en-scène. What is rehearsed is realized. The matrix as liturgy transforms and modulates the experience of participants.

Rappaport again: “To perform a liturgical order which is by definition a more or less invariant sequence of formal acts and utterances encoded by someone other than the performer is necessarily to conform to it” (Rappaport, 1999, p. 118).

The associations and dreams narrated in matrix do not, however, exhaust the sum of meaning-bearing messages and actions that bind the personal and interpersonal and realize the condition of impersonality.

The liturgy is comprised of at least seven components, which function synergetically and holistically in the matrix.

Free association
Free association in social dreaming is both deconstructive and creative. Free association deconstructs the language behaviours and states of mind and society of the reality principle in which extroverted, denotative language behaviour is dominant, dissolving the distinctions between things and manifesting hidden connections be¬tween dreams and participants.

Owning the other’s dream
Participants free-associate to the dreams of others as if they were their own. This technique rehearses a condition of impersonal field awareness, which is subsequently realized according to the performative logic of ritual: the personal recedes into the background as communitas is realized.

Impersonal speech—impersonal dream
The subject identifies with an impersonal aspect of her or his experience and speaks from this “place”. The focus upon the dream and not the dreamer facilitates the loosening of the personal relation to experience and cultivates an impersonal relation to one’s own dreams and the dreams of others. Dreams and associations are spoken to from a point of view beyond one’s immediate personal and interpersonal concerns. Often these points of view are expressive of social, cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic issues, riddles, dilemmas, and conundra. Dreams and associations become the com¬mon property of all participants.

Evenly suspended attention
Evenly suspended attention is the ideal orientation of analyst to analysand, democratized in the context of the social dreaming matrix as the relation of participant to participant —shorn of memory and desire, impartial, open, non-judgemental, interested, patient, fearless, impersonal. If evenly suspended attention is the “receptive pole” of intentionality in a matrix, its “active pole”, so to speak, is the will-to-link. The will-to-link reinforces the receptivity of the holding environment with a “tuning function” that operates at both a verbal and pre-or non-verbal level. Impartial, evenly suspended attention oscillates with the will-to-link.

The will-to-link
The will-to-link reverses the intentional centripetality of the self with its tendency to focus solely upon its own immediate needs, concerns, and projects, redirecting intentionality outwards towards others, seeking out links, connections, and meanings. The self thus posits the other as other, not as an extension of the self and its concerns. By directing one’s intentionality towards links, similarities and correspondences with others, agonistic relations are deconstructed and symbiontic relations are rehearsed and processionally realized. The other emerges not as an agonistic other but as a symbiontic co-producer of the emergent dream text, generated in the social dreaming matrix.

The mise-en-scène
Just as spatial relations in the therapeutic setting are configured in such a way as to relieve both analyst and analysand of the obligation to relate according to habitual interpersonal modes, thereby facilitating the emergence of an impersonal relation, the matrix is spatially configured to disrupt interpersonal relations —for example, with seating in the crystalline pattern of a snowflake— and to facilitate the emergence of an impersonal field.

Reorientation in the matrix
As the matrix takes hold, the participants find themselves inside a text that is operating according to an extra-ordinary language game. Distinctions and fixed reference points slip and slide, meanings multiply according to a principle of infinite mutability, as denotation-reference is rendered highly problematical. This text, in which uncertainty and ambiguity is multiplied, bears comparison with Roland Barthes’ (1975) euphoric account of the ideal, modernist, text —open, “write-able”, admissible to manifold and endless interpretation:

This ideal text … is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning, it is reversible. … Systems of meaning may take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language … it is a question of asserting the very existence of plurality, which is not that of the true, the probable or even the possible. [pp. 5-6]

In one crucial respect, however, the social dreaming text is unlike the text described by Barthes —it is immersive and existentially binding, at least for the time being. The text is not literature, but literature becomes the defining reality-principle in the state of mind and society that is the matrix: connotative-associative language behaviour is deployed in social space. It is if the participants had fallen into Eliot’s Waste Land or Kafka’s Castle.

Like Alice, their world has been turned upside down and inside out. They have fallen into a literature machine and are grist to its mill. This may be experienced either as a liberation or as a fight for survival, a matter of life and death. In order to adapt and flourish in this ad-hoc social order, the participants must reorient: a high degree of negative capability towards the emerging social order is necessary to process the allusive messages woven into a web of signification cut loose from its roots in the world of denotation-reference. This may precipitate a crisis as the participants struggle to maintain their orientation to the dominant reality-principle, or, depending upon the disposition of the participants, a gentle slide into a cloud of unknowing.

TRANSFORMATIONS IN DEEP MATRIX —SUNYATA AS A STATE OF MIND AND SOCIETY
The most common experiences generated in social dreaming matrices is that of communitas, the emergence of a web of symbiotic relationships and the “reciprocal dreaming” of identical dreams or dream motifs. However, in extraordinary circumstances, this gentle dissolution in communitas accelerates towards an existential crisis. In deep matrix, the experience of communitas opens an abyss into which identity and language may disappear.

This singular experience bears comparison to Buddhist accounts of Sunyata or emptiness. In a social dreaming matrix, however, this experience is an inherently social one, and herein lies its uniqueness.

Sunyata can be cognized as “emptiness”, where emptiness is experienced not as nothingness but as the dissolution and absence of both a unique self identity and a world of distinct and isolated, unrelated entities. In communitas, Sunyata is experienced as both a deeply personal experience and a transition to a new mode of collective life or state of society.

The enhancement of negative capability and the gradual tranquilization of the ego and its habitual language behaviour in referential-denotative mode —desiring, naming, classifying, and controlling its objective world of distinctions and differences— seems to fade away. A capacity for pure negative capability, contained and sustained by the symbiotic relations that now hold sway, takes the place of any residual desire to control or definitively name or hold onto experience. Existence is re-configured, emerging according to a different aspect. Things are seen “as they are”.

One’s habitual and instantaneous reflex to name and control one’s environment is stayed. Trungpa (1987) describes this habitual process in the following terms:

Whenever a perception of form occurs, there is an immediate reaction of fascination and uncertainty on the part of an implied perceiver of the form. This reaction is almost instantaneous. It takes only a fraction of a fraction of a second. And as soon as we have established recognition of what a thing is, our next response is to give it a name. With the name comes a concept. We tend to conceptualise the object, which means at this point we are no longer able to perceive things as they actually are. We have created a kind of padding, a filter or veil between ourselves and the object. … This veil removes us from panoramic awareness … because again and again we are unable to see things as they are. We feel compelled to name, to translate, to think discursively and this activity takes us away from direct and accurate perception, [p. 196]

The function of the social dreaming liturgy may be compared to the action of the koan upon the student in Zen Buddhism, where the attempt to decode enigmatic messages are designed to frustrate the analytical-rational faculty, liberating the linguistically bound mind of the student so as to bring about a re-orientation in perception towards an unmediated seeing of things as they are. In Zen, the meaning of the enigmatic koan “What is the meaning of Wu?” (Suzuki, 1956, p. 143) is not to be arrived at by the action of the intellect, in analysis or interpretation. The “meaning” of the koan is the state of mind that its “solution” brings about. The following schematization by D. T. Suzuki (1956) maps the progress of student and koan:

1. The koan is given to the student first of all to bring about a highly wrought-up state of consciousness.
2. The reasoning faculty is kept in abeyance, that is to say that the more superficial activity of the mind is set at rest so that its more central and profounder parts which are found generally deeply buried can be brought out and exercised to perform their native functions.
3. The affective and conative centres which are really the foundation of one’s personal character are charged to do their utmost in the solution of the koan.
4. When the mental integration thus reaches its highest mark there obtains a neutral state of consciousness which is erroneously described as “ecstasy” by the psychological student of religious consciousness. This Zen state of consciousness essentially differs from ecstasy in this: ecstasy is the suspension of the mental powers while the mind is passively engaged in contemplation; the Zen state of consciousness, on the other hand, is the one that has been brought about by the most intensely active exercise of all the fundamental faculties constituting one’s personality. This is the point where the empirical consciousness with all its contents both conscious and unconscious is about to tip over the borderline, and get noetically related to the Unknown, the Beyond, the Unconscious.
5. A penetrating insight into is born of the inner depths of consciousness, as the source of a new life has been tapped, and with it the koan yields up its secrets, [p. 149]

It Is perhaps the unique feature of social dreaming that the participants experience new states of awareness as a social breakthrough. Furthermore, any potential crisis experience is thwarted by the web of symbiotic relations that “break the fall” of participants as the familiar reality-principle waxes, wanes, and dissolves and new life-worlds emerge.

EXPERIENCES OF SUNYATA IN THE SOCIAL DREAMING MATRIX: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
As this process closes down a new life-world blooms. The cultural patina of meanings that until now have been constituting “the world” are revealed to have been not “the world” but “my world”. Language becomes “visible” as a medium, and the world is thrown into relief. Language, I now see, was never the mirror of nature but a strange and wonderful web of patterned subtle objects, which is tangential to the world.

Linguistic meaning seems to have become unanchored from the world; meaning floats in and around me as oil. The world accessible to verbalization has shrunk and an ineffable world of mystery bodies forth.

My rationality, however, is unimpaired. I am not swallowed up by a tidal wave of irrational forces. I am more than capable of rational analysis but, as the world unfolds before me, it seems at best irrelevant. Whereas before I inhabited a world of distinct things, I now inhabit a world in which things are mysteriously interconnected. The other participants seem to me both profoundly intimate yet infinitely distant and irremediably other. The experience is awe-ful and yet indescribably tranquil and compelling, redeemed and sustained by mystery and the supportive web of symbiotic relations.

That which can be verbalized, at this point, seems to me to be at best, trivial, at worst irrelevant. Language is falling further and further short of my immediate experience. A system of universal concepts, it seems to me at this point, cannot approximate to what I am feeling, seeing, and hearing. Perhaps this was always the case? The suspicion that this is so registers with the impact of a direct blow to the head.

The vocalizations of those around me carry an infinite pathos, like the bleating of lambs; infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering. We are fixed, immobile, bereft of consoling illusions, projects, distractions, lost, bereft, blind. But miraculously the experience is contained, it’s awful pathos matched by a deep sense of mystery, as the sheer uncanniness of the concrete unfolds. Like sentinels we may not act but can only attend —bearing witness to what unfolds before us.

When dreams are related or associations made, the meaning of the words appear to have been unanchored from their moorings in the world. They are simultaneously meaningful and yet infinitely estranged: both meaning-bearing and pure sonic affect —this music, unutterably strange and terribly beautiful. We seem to hover at the very threshold of sense. Vocalizations pulse intermittently across the matrix.

I appear to have made a most singular gesture, returning language the favour by giving it the slip. I flicker across the nature-culture border. What had previously been taken for granted —the apparent separateness of things, the accessibility of others, the substantiality of the self— is a veil fallen. In its place, mystery —not a supernatural mystery, but a natural one, the mystery of things as they are.

Experience flows glacially. Awareness is intense and unconflicted, the mind smooth as mahogany. According to the Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor, it is such experiences of Sunyata that reveals to us that the origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we habitually experience lie not in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world. At fault is the very act of assenting to our habitual world-view and the agonistic relations it sustains as an ultimate value (Batchelor, 1983, p. 105):

Through revealing that nothing at all is characterised by an independent, self sufficient identity, the desolate image of numerous isolated, unrelated entities has been dispelled. As this new vision unfolds, our basic anxiety and our sense of meaninglessness are dissolved in the growing awareness of the profound mystery of interrelatedness that permeates all phenomena. [p. 106]

In deep matrix, this new life-world is not merely glimpsed as a state of mind, as in certain meditative experiences, but stabilized as a state of mind and society.

The immediate
In a deep matrix the social experience of Sunyata may itself be subject to further modulations. The individual, sustained by the symbiotic relations established in matrix, may undergo an experience that threatens to shatter all categories, all boundaries, even the distinction between perceiver and perceived.

The flow of experience has stabilized, now wide and inclusive, deep and glacially slow. Adrift on this lake of negative capability, this extraordinary experience is held and contained, intense, energetic, and bright.

I am caught unawares by a sudden modulation and catch my breath —the flow of experience seems for a moment to have halted. In this stillness where experience is at a halt, the world is once more transfigured.

For an instant, it seems as if the moment and myself are one and the same. Or rather, I hover over a threshold, on one side of which there is space, time, and culture, on the other an absolute present, an identification with all that is, this moment that is neither “space” nor time nor “me” nor “world” but all and none of these.

The feeling is of an intense and total realization. There is nothing left out, nothing not-I, the moment is all and everything.

There is danger, however, in presenting this experience as exalted. For one has the distinct impression that this is simply how things really are, that this is the ordinary condition of experience, which is, under the sway of our everyday, conflicted and distracted lives, covered over.

Blanchot (1993) captures the nature of this mystery, of an experience that is strange by virtue of its uncommonness. This he tells us, is

An experience that one will represent to oneself as being strange and even as the experience of strangeness. But if it is so, let us recognize that it is not this because it is too removed. On the contrary, it is so close that we are prohibited from taking any distance from it —it is foreign in its very proximity. [p. 45]

This is the experience of the immediate, but brought closer than I had imagined possible, so close that the separation between myself and my world threatens to evaporate. I anxiously resist this dissolution.

An association, a passing thought, catches and pursues me. Is this anxious flight from impossibility, from the real to the contingent, from the impossible to the possible, the engine that conjures and stirs our world into being in the first place?

WORKING HYPOTHESES ON THE NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SOCIAL DREAMING
If matrix is a yoga, binding the personal in order to realize the impersonal, it is, in its current phase of development, a yoga of immanence not transcendence.

In its deployment of non-denotative language behaviours, in its unique and processional power to reframe perception, it is a liminal object that elides the boundary between ritual yoga and art-practice. The ends of social dreaming and the ends of art are perhaps one. Gabriel Josipovici’s (1979) account of the ends of art could be transposed to social dreaming without addition:

Art was not a means of piercing the sensible veil of the universe, of getting at the “unknown” for there was nothing beyond the world we see all around us. The artwork reveals to us the otherness of the world around —it shocks us out of our natural sloth and the force of habit, and makes us see for the first time, what we had looked at a hundred times but never seen. [p. 191]

Social dreaming, then, is an immanentizing method that returns us to the world by dissolving our culturally conditioned conceptual Platonism and habitual tendency to absent ourselves from our own experience: social dreaming makes it new.

Perhaps in the practice of social dreaming the insight behind Susan Sontag’s (1994) claim that “the earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical… an instrument of ritual” (p. 3) may be glimpsed.

Social dreaming shares with modern movements in art, literature, and philosophy a concern to recover aspects of experience that have been lost or covered over in our modern Western societies.

This attempt at recovery is described by Charles Taylor (1992) as a desire to bring about

the retrieval of the lived experience or creative activity underlying our awareness of the world, which had been occluded or denatured by the regnant mechanistic construal. The retrieval is felt as a liberation, because the experience can become more vivid and the activity unhampered through being recognized, and alternatives open up in our stance toward the world which were quite hidden before, [p. 460]

It shares with modern movements an extraordinary deployment of language which challenges denotative-utilitarian language use and behaviour, in favour of non-ordinary uses of language designed to break open our habitual ways of seeing and return us to the world:

In a mechanistic or utilitarian world we come to deal with things in a mechanical, conventionalised way. Our attention is turned away from things to what we are getting done through them. Ordinary prose reflects this. It deals in dead counters, which allow us to refer to things without really seeing them… Poetry is meant to break through this abstraction. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process. The poetic image breaks from a language of counters and gives a fresh intuitive language which restores our vision of things. [p. 460]

However, because social dreaming is more immersive and existentially binding than art, it may modulate towards an experience that is beyond or beside language.

Social dreaming facilitates a kind of progressio harmonica, a progressive recuperation of world to itself in which the vocabulary of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is rendered increasingly problematical and inadequate to facts of experience. Moreover, if the experiences in deep matrices mirror the progressive integrations of traditional ritual, then these integrations may be occurring at both experiential and organic levels as the participants begin to operate as if they were one, more like a single organism than a collective (Rappaport, 1999, p. 224).

According to Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili, “ritual techniques neutralize the functioning of the analytic conceptual mode, bringing to the fore developmentally earlier functioning. This mode associates aspects of experience transductively: that is, it makes lateral associations based upon class similarity, overlapping class membership, or emotional affinity” (quoted in Rappaport, 1999, p. 227).

A deep matrix may even provide participants with experiences of wholeness that are conventionally vouchsafed by only the pious or committed follower of transformational practices such as yoga or meditation. Moreover, social dreaming is uniquely suited to the Western psyche, which has become alienated from aspects of body, mind, community, and the natural world.

As Rappaport observes (Rappaport, 1999, p. 402) such experiences of oneness or participation in progressively larger systems, of which the individual mind is only a function or subsystem, may even prove to be of evolutionary value. The conventional view of the person as a self-subsistent monad that is prevalent today, the era of the individual, has been challenged by modern intellectual and social movements as various as Marxism, deconstruction in its multiple guises, new-ageism, systems theory, and the ecology movement. Yet the “natural” tendency to experience oneself as a unique, self-subsistent individual, reinforced and underwritten by institutional conditioning, overrides the truths of reason, and the fantasy of the unique sovereign self remains inviolate. Under “ordinary” conditions, I experience myself as a separate individual and behave correspondingly:

To ask conscious reason to lead unaided the separate individuals in which it resides to favour the long-term interests of ecosystems and societies over their immediate concerns may be too much to ask of it. Sustained compliance with the imperatives of larger systems not only may require more than ordinary reason, but may have to be maintained in defiance of a consciousness that in its nature informs humans of their separateness. [Rappaport, 1999, p. 403]

Social dreaming may provide a technology for achieving such an overcoming, challenging conventional truth inscribed in the present as ultimate, giving separate individuals experiences of the impersonal whole that are inaccessible to them under ordinary conditions:

Although humans are metabolically separate from one another, and although consciousness is individual, humans are not self sufficient and their autonomy is relative and slight. They are parts of larger systems upon which their continued existence is contingent. But the wholeness, if not indeed the very existence of those systems, may be beyond the grasp of ordinary consciousness. Although conscious reason is incomplete, participation in rituals may enlarge the awareness of those participating in them, providing them with understandings of perfectly natural aspects of the social and physical world that may elude unaided reason. [p. 402]

The alterations of self wrought in the social dreaming experience can act

in the service of the organisation and reorganisation understandings that include discursive as well as non-discursive elements and processes. They are in the service of integration which may be, for the novice or learner in a rite of passage, a novel synthesis, a new and deeper understanding of the world. [p. 388]

Social dreaming is a laboratory of experimental phenomenology in which aspects of this larger mind, in which the individual is immanent and of which the individual is merely a subsystem, may be first verified, explored, and perhaps eventually re-inscribed in an expanded common sense.

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published 28 January 08