#10 Social Dreaming Matrix during the Covid-19 pandemic. Notes from 4th June
38 participants
18 dreams and 38 associations
- Preoccupation with female authority, the body, and birth
- apocalyptic dreams and association perhaps associated with the fear of a second wave of the virus
- Feelings of loss expressed by members at the lower number of participants perhaps to do with the fact although it is constantly stated that ‘we are in this all together’ . Though at this point We are not.
Dream 1: I was in a big hole with a lot of people. A spokesperson of the government was standing in a podium announcing a new virus. He was telling that to protect oneself you needed to put something white in the top of the heads. Some people had small hats in the top of the head, other had helmets, kitchen towels, etc in top of the head.
Association 1: Tin-man, cover your head, your legs, everything.
Association 2: as a child going to Catholic Church, if we didn’t have our heads covered with lace my grandmother would always have a tissue to put there.
Association 3: Church and first communion
Dream 2: In the streets of Hong Kong they were organising a bicycle race. Streets were blocked and barriers were up. He took a bus and went to a friend house. They were removing a wooden floor to replace it with a new one.
Association 4: A new virus and a new floor. The virus is in the surface, like the floor or hands, bodies. Remove and old floor to have a new one where you can walk
Dream 3: I am standing outside; the landscape is covered in white sand. I try to uncover something under the sand, there were 5 gold coins between white lines and codes with different pathways.
Dream 4: I enter my balcony and notice that my feet are lifting off the floor. I take off and I can fly. I start asking if it is real or if I am dreaming while in reality I could be falling off the balcony
Dream 5: I am walking home from city centre. Carrying lunch from my house. I ask a hug from my brother for my birthday. I wait for a while, but he doesn’t come so I start walking home but I realise I no longer know the way home.
Association 5: To the dreams of sand and gold coins. So many particles of sand. Too many to know how many they are. The passage of time, the city centre and birthday, disorientation and being lost.
Dream 6: Father’s long term business partner dies.
Dream 7: Also of death: A bird was dying on a street pavement. I was in a boat. I want to jump off the boat and save the bird, but I am scared. An inner voice tells me everything is okay and not to interfere. Then I think I need to figure out the connection between birds and my name.
Dream 8: I am frantically searching for something. Someone I use to know but lost touch with is in the dream. He is calm, collected, cool. He said I have been preparing my whole life for what is happening, this chaos and confusion. I wonder, what is it that he was getting prepared for?
Association 6: Death in the dream can represent a new beginning. What does he know what can happen?
Association 7: There are 4 or 6 more matrix and it is the first time that we are not over 50 participants. Hoping on a new start, maybe a new beginning and a new matrix.
Dream 9: I am confined in the countryside. A little bird is dead because it smashed against a closed window. I wanted to touch him, but I am phobic, so I ask someone else to take care. Then a cat catching a little mouse, trying to kill a bird. I watch the cat persecuting them and killing them. There is the fear of basic instincts going back to something scary.
Association 8: A crow with a broken wing that I watched from my boat. I enjoyed watching him. It’s probably dead now, I didn’t interfere.
Association 9: Honk Kong as a little bird with a broken wing I have to watch without doing anything.
Dream 10: I was wearing a leopard print black and white outfit that was fashionable 20 years ago. I was in the kitchen making dinner. Queen Elizabeth was there along with some other friends. I overcook the meat because the Queen was there. The queen asks me to come with her to Windsor, that Joy was taking her. I decline saying I am not dress appropriately
Dream 11: In the car with the Duchess of Cambridge. I am happy to be with her in a car but leave her and felt sorry while happy to share an intimate moment with her. I realised that she could not help her
Association 10: With the visit to the brother and the birthday. She associates with a friend who’s birthday she was afraid to forget.
Association 11: The Queen and the Duchess, in the tower the queen is always depicted with a bird in her hands.
Dream 12: in a house like my own I am aware that someone has come in. I notice a basket that belongs to an old friend. Then I see a beautiful leopard that I know is my friend. Then an owl passes me ahead of the leopard. All this happens while the house was full of wild animals.
Association 12: Women wearing Sari. Queen Athena keeping an Owl with her at all time, It can see through deception because it flies high and can see in the night. She protected like that from people deceiving her.
Association 13: Confusion. Wild animals and domestic animals. Monarchy together with us. The heads cover as an image of the workers and controlled.
Association 14: Jazz musician Charlie Parker, known as ‘the Bird’, from Bird land in New York City.
Association 15: He is reminded of the daemons in His Dark Materials
Association 16: The death of her psychoanalytic psychotherapist who died suddenly while they were working together. Feeling of loss and death of access to parts of herself. In the dreams is not very clear what she is meant to do or meant to go, what the instructions are. How save or contained these daemons are.
Association 17: Last therapy which lasted 5 years and at a certain moment the therapist stopped him and said we have to stop because you will never change your mind and I can’t help you.
Association 18: With Athena and the Royals and the Giant Madonna of Misericordia with old the little things in her…
Dream 13: I am surfing and I land in the sand without much consequences. Two friends are watching minding their own business and wanted to go snorkelling in another boat. I am sad, I cannot find good waves instead of arriving abruptly to the beach as the waves in that moment.
Association 19: What happens when you get separated from your daemons, you die. A song named ‘where dreams go to die’.
Association 20: Trying to put the black rat in the box. Trying to separate from its natural habitat.
Association 21: The beach, in various dreams and the water in the beach. How it is easier to walk in the sand when is wet.
Association 22: Quarantine, natural environment, what will happen if we get separated from that
Association 23: If we get separated from our dreams, we are also going to die.
Dream 14: I was on a beach with my sister and there was a dune that started growing and growing creating a shadow
Association 24: thinking of beaches and bitches – I find difficult to work with women
Association 25: Our separation from nature, we have abused nature, we have divorced Mother Earth. Wild animals sold in China link to the virus…
Dream 15: With her wife in front of the beach. The waves become enormous, but the wife is so calm. Wife say don’t worry; the waves will not get us. We are so high.
Dream 16: On a paddle-board, the sea with the consistency of oil. He sees a dune and wants to reach it. He keeps trying to go to it was difficult because the road was too steep. Eventually he is guided through a path and make it to a restaurant.
Association 26: “On the beach” is the title of the novel. A novel about nuclear war where the characters are waiting for the radiation to reach them from the northern hemisphere. Waiting to die.
Association 27: Tsunami. The current situation feeling like a tsunami
Staff Hypothesis: What happens in the summer when countries lift quarantine – what if the virus comes back – does it feel like a tsunami?
Association 28: Violence are as deadly as an epidemically. Martin Luther King had a dream and now America is in flames.
Association 29: Seen the film of the book “On the beach’. Australian society waiting for the nuclear fallout to get them. They are in quarantine the rest of the world has died. They pick up a radio signal. They wonder if there is a surviving human but hesitate to rescue. They go anyway but find no one.
Association 30: New Zealand, Southern Hemisphere has good leadership, 1 or 2 fatalities versus USA Northern Hemisphere where it is so bad.
Association 31: New Zealand has a woman prime minister, and this was not said.
Association 32: A beach is a place of birth. As in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
Dream 17: Himself and his twin brother plus children on a beach in Lago Maggiore. Looks at his mother coming out of the water and is stunned of how beautiful she is.
Dream 18: Giving birth to a little girl, who is taken away and wrapped before being brought back. Feels very disconnected from her.
Association 33: Women in authority are being mentioned specifically, the Queen, the Duchess the Prime Minister.
Association 34: Silence. remembers her of church. Is there healing being provided?
Association 35: Men and their role or masculinity and its presence, the way it has been, it is dying, it is finished. The power and beauty of women is scary. We don’t know the place of men, their role in society. Link to New Zealand and America
Association 36: quotes Donne “For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” The loss of one is the loss of all
Association 37: No man is an island.
Association 38: The leader of Canada took 21 seconds to answer a question about what is happening in America and said he was horrified and found it very sad what is happening to his neighbour.
Themes:
- Sand coming out in different forms, walking on sand not so easy. The fabric of society is disintegrating.
- Overwhelming grief, in himself and in the dreams. Grief of what has been lost. People, beauty, richness.
- Grief in connection with the number of people in this event. There is something intolerable of staying with this grief. And the silences, there is something that cannot be said.
- Polarities, New Zealand, USA, Female leaders versus Males,
- Strong sense of loss of control, subversion of order which is scary
- How disturbing it is when an accident t cannot be talked about. Made a reference to the staff and the fact that one had their video on at some point and that it was not mentioned by staff or participants, a variation on the theme of not interfering that came up in dreams.
- Building things on sand, are societies and thinking built on sand.
- Enjoy listening the silence. Time to listen.
- Relaxation of confinement. People dreaming to go to the beach travel to Greece
Blog compiled by Matt Gieve, Monica Velarde and Martha Mens
Image: Responsibility by Juliet Scott, 2019
This is in context of presence of leopard and owl in the dreams and the journeying into the world of death, dying and the necessary element of re-birth.
I have found that mythological stories help one understand the nature of the unconscious dynamics…because of some of these have been around for hundreds and thousands of years that man has been here…and our connection to animals, who have been around longer, is part of our journeying through difficult times triggered by nature (within and without).
Anubis is the Greek name of the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head.
The Jumilhac papyrus recounts a tale where Anubis protected the body of Osiris from Set. Set attempted to attack the body of Osiris by transforming himself into a leopard. Anubis stopped and subdued Set, however, and he branded Set’s skin with a hot iron rod. Anubis then flayed Set and wore his skin as a warning against evil-doers who would desecrate the tombs of the dead. Priests who attended to the dead wore leopard skin in order to commemorate Anubis’ victory over Set. The legend of Anubis branding the hide of Set in leopard form was used to explain how the leopard got its spots.
In Greek mythology, a little owl (Athene noctua) traditionally represents or accompanies Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, or Minerva, her syncretic incarnation in Roman mythology. Because of such association, the bird – often referred to as the “owl of Athena” or the “owl of Minerva” – has been used as a symbol of knowledge, wisdom, perspicacity and erudition throughout the Western world. Athena[b] or Athene,[c] often given the epithet Pallas,[d] is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, handicraft, and warfare[3] who was later syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva.[4] Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of various cities across Greece, particularly the city of Athens, from which she most likely received her name.