Sharing dreams and social visions

Sharing dreams and social visions

How do people find hope in the darkest times? This conversation on All In The Mind takes that question into the strange, vivid territory of our dreams during the COVID pandemic. Social dreaming researcher David Patman kicks things off, framing social dreaming as a way to look at "the unconscious dimension of the social world".

From there, psychotherapist and organisational psychologist Franca Fabini and researcher Susan Long share how groups have been meeting in "matrices"—both in person and on Zoom—to trade dreams and look for patterns that say something about collective fears, hopes and memories. You’ll hear Fabini describe early 2020 dreams of asteroids, disasters and people losing control of their cars, images that seemed, in hindsight, to echo the looming crisis.

Later dreams about boats full of Italians, border closures and lockdowns shift the focus to feeling like refugees in one’s own country. For Fabini, the power lies in the fact that "the important part is the dream, not the dreamer", and in how one dream connects to another to show the invisible ties between people. Long adds rich context, tracing social dreaming back to Gordon Lawrence and examples like Charlotte Bratt’s work on dreams during the Nazi regime.

She shares pandemic dreams filled with anxiety, death, absent parents and a sense of being abandoned by a higher power, noting there were "very few hope dreams" in these sessions. Along the way, Fabini recounts using social dreaming inside a mental health hospital, where staff dreams of floods, basements and tricky vertical journeys quietly mapped tensions between departments and their shared history.

If you’re curious about what your nightly stories might say about the society around you—and how sharing them could spark more democratic, ego-light conversations—this episode might leave you wondering what your own dreams are trying to say about us all.