Dreaming across continents: A collaborative inquiry into dream sharing as a resource for action researchers

Abstract

This is a collaborative inquiry into how dream sharing might inform our work as action researchers. Our main inquiry’s purpose was to explore participants’ experiences of an action research conference through sharing dream material in a social dreaming matrix, set up to create collective rather than individual meanings from dreams. A further purpose, which developed as we reported on the social dreaming matrix, was to examine our own dream insights as an ongoing parallel process whereby we shared our own dreams to facilitate and inform our reporting. We did this through documentary exchange and monthly telephone interchanges. Our theorizing about the interplay between conscious and unconscious mental processes draws on the psychoanalytically based ideas of Bion, Jung, Bollas, and Gordon Lawrence who developed the ideas and practice of social dreaming. We found our dream sharing helped overcome difficulties in writing the paper through a deeper and different level of knowing. Four themes emerged, they were the challenges and risks of doing action research particularly on dreaming, new insights and challenges that our dream sharing raised, the search for guides in our life and work, and the irruption of our research in other aspects of our lives.