Harnessing Dreams for Deeper Human Connections

Peter: 00:00:03

You're listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast, exploring the universal truths that we see woven through culture, consciousness, and the human experience.

Ryan: 00:00:17

Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast. I'm Ryan.

Peter: 00:00:22

And I'm Peter.

Ryan: 00:00:23

And today I wanted to round out our series related to dreaming. We've talked about lucid dreaming. We talked a little bit about dreaming when we were talking about Rupert Spira.

And what spawned all this was an episode from the Telepathy Tapes. Well, it's not called Telepathy Tapes. What is it called?

Peter: 00:00:43

Talk Tracks.

Ryan: 00:00:43

Talk Tracks with Kai Dickens. And on that episode, there was two guests. One of the guests we didn't feel super aligned with talked a little bit about lucid dreaming.

We decided to take our own take on that. But Gordon Lawrence developed this dream practice called social dreaming. And now Dan Lawrence, apparently unrelated, is a practitioner of this.

What social dreaming does is it gathers a group of people, people who generally are connected in some way seems to be the purpose nowadays, at least. So for an example, it could be a corporate or organizational thing. The first part is this idea of building a matrix, or the matrix phase.

Peter: 00:01:30

So the matrix is kind of a facilitation method where you have the participants sitting, I believe, facing outwards from each other. Like in a circle facing outwards from each other. So they're not facing each other, and the facilitator is somewhere in the middle or something.

But there's a particular seating arrangement in which the. The participants then share their dreams.

Ryan: 00:01:55

So the idea is that the dreams are shared, and out of that sharing, you're looking for sort of patterns.

Peter: 00:02:04

And I think we're looking for the participants individually to make connections to whatever dream is shared. The very dramatic example that was given was the Indian experience.

So someone in this group of doctors was like a conference or something where the doctors didn't all know each other. They were from across the region. One participant said, I had this dream that my parents were traveling in India and they got lost.

And I was really desperate and worried about them.

And I had to coordinate with the local authorities or organizers to try to locate them and triangulate their location based on different communications. And so this was just a dream for this person, had no basis in reality.

And then immediately someone across the room stood up and said, oh, my God, that happened to my parents. I don't know. Last night.

Ryan: 00:02:54

Yeah, it was very proximal.

Peter: 00:02:56

Yeah. And my parents are traveling in India, and they were lost last night, and I was really worried about them. Da, da, da.

And so Basically the first participant in his dream had the experience of the other participant. Now that's, I think, not a typical sharing or outcome.

But the idea is one person is sharing a dream with, you know, apparently nothing to do with anybody else. And you're not interpreting it what it means to the person who had the dream.

Ryan: 00:03:27

Right.

Peter: 00:03:27

You're just seeing how the group reacts to it.

Ryan: 00:03:30

So that actually created some of the complication with my understanding around the practice because that anecdote pointed my perception towards this is how like the purpose of, like, oh, isn't it neat how, you know, we're keyed into, you know, the, the broader consciousness or whatever. But what I found is that typically the typical use case, so to speak, for social dreaming is, is as you said, you know, they're in a group.

I read that it could be set up in a couple of different ways, but one of the ways where they're in a circle and the point is that we're not interpreting the dream specifically and not interpreting the dream with relation to the dreamer, but that by sharing the recent dreams of the group, which you know, is somewhere like 8 to 20 people in the group, especially in.

So again, that anecdote was a little bit different than what it sounds like the usual use cases, which is a group of people who have a shared purpose or something. Culture.

Peter: 00:04:43

Yeah, it sounds like the general purpose is more kind of inspirational.

Like they talk about kind of conceptual blockbusting, brainstorming, getting out of ruts for teams, allowing teams to come up with new and better solutions to things that they're dealing with, whether it's team dynamics or projects or other things.

Ryan: 00:05:02

Yes. And there is a documented study and I will put it in the links, this is published the National Library of Medicine.

This was relevance of social dreaming for action research exploring jail workers unconscious thinking of the changes in prison organization. So this is one of the first documented uses of social dreaming in prison settings.

And what happened was this was an Italian prison that had moved to a rehabilitation style mechanism of correction. And they basically used social dreaming. Gathering seven prison guards and five educators. And they were brought in and used social dreaming.

And in sharing the dreams. The group then takes the dreams of the whole and starts drawing correlative, pattern or meaning based but not meaning to the person that dreamed it.

They started finding common themes that were related to trust, competency and weakness, professional identity crisis, separateness and privacy, safety and gender dynamics. These all kind of came out of this exercise.

And what happened was then the prison system was able to take action on that to help remedy some of these unconscious sentiments that were seemingly filtering through the staff in a way that wouldn't normally be able to be articulated because it's living in a subconscious state or something like that. So that was an interesting example that I found and made more sense to me as far.

Far as, okay, we're looking for broader patterns of sentiment existing within the field of shared existence.

Peter: 00:06:58

Yeah, I mean, so that's an interesting example because you can see easily how you wouldn't get that information from something like a survey.

Ryan: 00:07:06

Right.

Peter: 00:07:06

Because you wouldn't ask the kinds of questions that would elicit those emotional responses.

Ryan: 00:07:12

And they may not even be aware of.

Peter: 00:07:13

Right. Double it.

Ryan: 00:07:15

So that was interesting and it made much more sense to me. I think it's a neat tool, practice, not just for corporate sense, but in getting to that deeper connection amongst close relation.

But then moving out like it, it starts to make me wonder more about connection beyond, you know, people close.

Peter: 00:07:39

Yeah. So I want to come at that in a couple of ways. So what you just referenced, connection beyond people who are close.

Carl Jung, the psychologist who really focused on the shared subconscious, I think was a lot of dream stuff.

So clearly there's a strong implication of drawing on this kind of metaphysical connection, the connection that exists between us because we are human beings and have subconsciousnesses, plural. But Jung says that there is a collective subconscious and so we're all connected through that.

But what I've seen from the example is the more conventional kind of connectedness and team building and trust from.

It's a really common phenomena in the groups that I work with that, you know, it was a very simple exercise of who else has this, you know, who, who resonates with this, you know, and you have hand raised and everybody raised their hand. And the person who shared their initial concern then gains connection to the group.

Like whenever someone shares a personal issue in a group, the group gains connection to the individual. But when the group responds as, oh, I connected with that now this, the individual's connection to the group is strengthened.

And so in social dreaming, you can see how, like, if I share a dream and then people in the group respond to that like, oh, that has meaning to me now that team is that much stronger because there's a really intimate personal connection now between those two people who made that connection of like, oh, you shared a dream and I connected with it. And then I told you that I connected with it. And so that's a real significant bond. I mean, it's not a bond like surviving an accident together.

Or something like that. But in terms of a very simple social interaction, that's a good bond. That's like sharing a good meal together, right? Yeah.

So I think it's interesting because before we came on Mike, we were talking a little bit about, as we do, conventional reality and an ultimate reality. And so this is touching on both aspects of that, I think.

Ryan: 00:10:04

So the first thing I thought of when it came to social dreaming, and you tell me if you agree or not, because you're more experienced with the gae, which is the group awareness exercise, and this was like the thing that came to mind to me, which was expressing your observations or experience and then having that shared reflection and connection piece. That the first thing that came to mind to me was that similar to gae? Not exactly, but, like, the flavor of.

Peter: 00:10:35

It, the way I would think of it, is building resonance. So the gae, you're not responding to each other at all. You're just sharing your internal experience from moment to moment.

Of course, you're hearing other people speak and you're taking that in and you're finding or not similarities. That's not. You're not looking for similarities, but when similarities happen, then you're building resonance. Right.

And when you hear things that are wildly dissimilar, it can be opening, like, oh, I've never heard of that, or I've never had that experience. And then you realize, like, oh, that could be an experience of opening. So, yeah, I'd say I agree.

They're similar in terms of that building resonance within the group, creating exchanges where someone else can have the experience of, oh, I really resonate with what that person said. And of course, the difference being for social dreaming, you're very explicitly sharing the resonance of that. The experience of resonance.

Ryan: 00:11:39

Yeah. It is an interesting thing that I would be curious about.

I don't think I would bring it to work, but it would be interesting to see what kind of comes. Well, I mean, to be honest, at work, some of the project work that we used to do often had similar essences.

They weren't focused on this kind of thing. But the connections and the brainstorming were always a positive experience to me. Mostly a positive.

So, like, something like that I could see as beneficial, but also makes me think more broadly how interesting it would be to collect huge amounts of data and have some kind of computer to be able to suss through and pick up patterns. But, you know, this goes to a future topic between both the random number generator and the heart maths, where the idea of a broader.

Peter: 00:12:35

I'LL tell you. That's your thought.

Ryan: 00:12:37

The idea of a broader connection is intriguing and it would be intriguing if there was a way to collect broader social dreaming data and if there's less regional connection. Right, right. What is the species, so to speak? Sentiment and feelings and unconscious things that are going on.

Peter: 00:12:59

Yeah. So have you seen anything about doing social dreaming remotely, like on a zoom?

Ryan: 00:13:07

I haven't seen anything on that. I don't see any reason that would preclude something.

Peter: 00:13:11

Right, right. The reason I was laughing is because it just reminded me of that other podcast guys, I'm like. And our server is so amazing.

Ryan: 00:13:20

It's like after I said what I was like thinking the exact same thing. He was an interesting fellow and I.

Peter: 00:13:27

Came across him again because as I started to do separate episode. But I've been pursuing lucid dreaming a little bit and of course I did come across his website.

Ryan: 00:13:37

Interesting.

Peter: 00:13:38

Which didn't sound anything like him. Like I had to like, oh, I think this is this guy. And had to look it up.

Ryan: 00:13:43

Oh, really?

Peter: 00:13:44

And it was him.

Ryan: 00:13:44

Was his. Did he come off the same?

Peter: 00:13:47

No, not at all. I mean, it was a company website. It was about a particular. Yeah, okay, yeah, interesting.

Ryan: 00:13:53

So it just didn't flow too well on that.

Peter: 00:13:55

It was just his way of narrating his own thing is just not as.

Ryan: 00:13:59

Which, I mean, I can appreciate his zeal for what they're doing, even if it didn't come off as all that meaningful. I can see how his excitement about being able to connect with people in the dream state and some of the theoretical future stuff.

Peter: 00:14:19

And you know what, honestly, I put a little bit of that on the podcast as well because, I mean, he was a guest with basically an interviewer and the interviewer didn't do him any favors in terms of kind of guiding him into more coherent responses like, oh, let me ask you more about what you just said.

Ryan: 00:14:38

So social dreaming itself, I mean, from what I could tell, doesn't have any, like validated studies, which I think is actually an area that would be beneficial to trying not necessarily random control. But is there a way for us to then validate action? Right. So in the traditional quality plan, do check, act, or however you want to say it. Right.

In the context of this example of the Italian prison, they did this exercise, they drew some correlation, they took action.

Peter: 00:15:15

What was the quality? Was it improved?

Ryan: 00:15:17

Proper action? Did it actually make a difference? So that would have been a nice follow up.

Peter: 00:15:23

Right, so those are kind of two.

Okay, so I'm going to speculate that regardless of the quality of the outcome, and I'm going to say for the inmates, and just to digress momentarily, I was having a bit of a chuckle to myself because I was waiting for you to say that there were inmates involved because it was a prison session, like, oh, there were no inmates in this social dreaming.

But that, you know, I really am kind of focused on the experience of the team members just in how they feel about each other, how much value there is there regardless of the quality of the initial outcome.

Ryan: 00:16:04

Right.

Peter: 00:16:05

I would speculate that even if the quality of that first action wasn't good, the quality of subsequent actions over time would probably improve because their communication would improve because of the improved relationship interrelationship of the team.

Ryan: 00:16:24

Yeah, well, and it's, I think important to note that the patterns and themes and correlations are determined by and large by the participants. It's not dictated by the facilitator. The facilitator is there to encourage the analysis, I guess is the word.

But it's not interpreting dreams, but it's drawing some themes, some patterns that those would have been identified by the people themselves. So it would be likely then that they agree that those are things that need to be addressed.

Peter: 00:16:59

But to your point, the practice is one of organizational psychology. That seems to be the realm of social dreaming. Right.

It's like improving teams, improving teamwork, improving doing conceptual blockbusting, giving people fresher ideas and approaches. And so obviously you have to run so many groups to get data to say how well they are.

Problem solving, where is the improvement in problem solving amongst a number of different groups dealing with a number of different problems over time.

Ryan: 00:17:35

Right.

Peter: 00:17:35

So it's a cumbersome. I mean it's not a, it's not a trivia.

Ryan: 00:17:38

Yeah.

Peter: 00:17:39

You know, it's not like, oh, let's recruit something and run an experiment for two months and we're done. It would be like, you know, at least a year, I would guess. Right. To have multiple trials for a given group to give them an opportunity to improve.

Right. Yeah, Non trivial.

Ryan: 00:17:55

Yeah, yeah, no doubt. But you would expect that they would also improve the proficiency in the exercise. Right. It would become more comfortable and more.

Peter: 00:18:04

I mean that's kind of the baseline. Right. That's like getting to baseline. So then you can actually start to use it. Yeah.

It's a lot of interesting questions around how you would research this and what outcomes would look like to show a positive result of the question.

Ryan: 00:18:22

Yeah, but it sounds like this is a thing. I mean, Dan Lawrence is doing this I'm sure he's not the only one out there that offers this as like he, I think he does the facilitation.

Peter: 00:18:33

Well. So, yeah, I mean most things are not evidence based, right? Most, most business practices are not evidence based.

Or most like people who do consults for like how many things did we see in our organization or at meetings where they had a keynote speaker and they're like, oh, this person. And it's like, yeah, it's a, it's a public speaker who's selling a thing. It's like nobody's asking for evidence.

I have this book, here's a squeezy toy that represents my book and buy my book and I'll give you a 20 minute talk to convince you that I know what I'm talking about.

So this, not to denigrate this practice, but in my mind it kind of falls into that of like, yeah, this is someone who comes into large organizations and markets a practice to help in.

Ryan: 00:19:19

Some way and presumably the customers are finding value which wouldn't have business.

Peter: 00:19:25

Right. Which from a skeptics perspective. Right. It's like why people keep on paying for this stuff. Right, right.

It's always like, we've sold a million books or I've had this many engagements, so it must be good because people keep on paying for it. It's like, well, right. Is it, I mean, do people keep on paying because the marketing's really good or because the outcomes are good?

And are the outcomes good? Because placebo effect and it's just like this person's charismatic and he just makes people feel good.

So for six months after he's there, things are good, everything's good, you know, and there's improvement. I mean, obviously just by improving morale, you're going to improve performance. Probably.

Ryan: 00:20:06

Yeah.

Peter: 00:20:07

Right. Because people aren't sniping and grousing and they're focused on, oh, how do we help each other, how do we work?

You know, there's a positive intention built.

Ryan: 00:20:18

Into a whole thing and personal connection, like building that.

Peter: 00:20:21

Right.

Ryan: 00:20:21

Humanizing connection with your teammates.

Peter: 00:20:24

Right. So yeah, it would be very interesting.

I mean, I don't mean to be skeptical about social dreaming and saying there's no value in it and it's like all about marketing. But it. Yeah, I don't mean to be primaris, I'm just, I'm just raising. Yeah, of course. Interpretation.

Ryan: 00:20:40

Yes, of course. And I think it's been interesting in this kind of exploration of setting dreaming as a tool for growth and for awareness, awakening all those things.

You know, we discussed lightly, but the idea of the dream yoga. Mingir Rinpoche, when he mentioned falling asleep while meditating.

Oh, yeah, you fall asleep while meditating and then wake up and you're still meditating. That counts as meditation.

Peter: 00:21:13

That's so interesting that you. That you remember that. I don't know what you're talking about.

Ryan: 00:21:17

It was meaningful to me. I actually connected because I have done that before. And in a way I came to terms with that.

That was essentially a micro lucid dream, in a way, because I was maintaining that meditative state through a sleep state. But the point being that there is, I think, clearly some value in leveraging the sleep state.

And there's a number of different tools and activities to do that, be it lucid dreaming or, you know, the dream yoga, if you have a group that you can work on with the social dreaming. And we talked about lucid dreaming in general. Right. Those are tools.

And that state of mind gives access to a subconscious or some other area that is generally not as accessible in the waking state.

Peter: 00:22:10

Yeah.

So to completely reverse myself from kind of that skeptical, conventional perspective I was expressing, my current schema of things is that conventional reality isn't really real, that this is, as Camel calls it, this is our physical matter reality. It's just this limited aspect of reality that we experience. And per Hoffman, what's really real is consciousness.

And physical reality just arises out of consciousness. And that social dreaming.

And as you're saying, all kinds of dreaming are contact points of access from our physical reality into the reality of consciousness.

That in physical reality our conscious minds are constantly blocking because of our habitual patterns conditioning, our conscious minds are constantly blocking our access to higher consciousness. Which is weird because we call it.

It's strange that we call it our conscious minds, our conventional mind is blocking our access to higher consciousness. And it's only when we have insights, when we have. People use psychedelics, people have.

I know there are epileptic episodes have been associated with awakening dreams.

So when we, you know, social dreaming, lucid dreaming, this is all phenomenon where you are in some way sidestepping your conventional conscious mind and so getting more access to capital C consciousness. Yeah. So it's just. I'm just like observing myself doing that whiplash from skeptic to like, oh, only consciousness is real.

Anyway, it's my life nowadays.

Ryan: 00:24:02

I enjoyed this discussion about dreams in general, this series.

I think it's been really interesting and so hopefully you guys all think so as well and can share your own experiences, be it with Lucid dreaming or with any of these other dream practices or a dream practice we didn't cover at all. We'd be happy to hear from you. And until next time. We'll talk to you later.

Peter: 00:24:27

See you then. Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast. Join us next time as we continue the discussion.

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and visit www.eth-studio.com for more information and.