Book Reviews

Abstract

This is an intriguing book, written by a pair of psychotherapists with an interest in ‘dreaming the social’. The method of Social Dreaming focuses not on the individual dreamer, as in conventional psychotherapy, but on the social and cultural knowledge contained in the dream itself. The authors’ fascinating proposition is that our dreams represent the ‘social unconscious’. This knowledge is made accessible through the free association of ideas, between groups of people (known as the Social Dreaming Matrix), which result from the sharing of dreams. Social Dreaming, it is suggested, provides a new way of thinking about the many problems we now face in Western society, old and new, individual and global. It offers a form of self-expression to gain access to things we know but are unable to think.