All I know for sure is that dreams are the pictures of states wanting to turn into processes. Dreams are maps of the beginning of an otherwise unchartered trip into the unknown.
Arnold Mindell
I am writing this whist preparing to teach a five day intensive facilitation training in London in February 2025. It’s called Collective Dreaming: Embodying new patterns for facilitation, relationships, communities and the world. Our dreams, body problems, symptoms and relationship issues are not just about us or for us alone. We are influenced and dreamt by a field that has collective features and attributes.
Ten minute read
Memes, Myths and Algorithms and why we need collective dreamwork
Photo from the GoDeep Project – one of the ways Processwork is used is community work
“These ghostly whispers shape and bend us much of the time, when we don’t even realise they are doing so. They are entangle with notions of empire, supremacy narratives, racism, sexism, ablism with long roots stretching back in time.”
We are made to be social and interconnected beings and like everything else we are part of natural systems. But in the culture I grew up in, many people still have have a confused relationship with this idea. For example, mainstream medicine continues to see illness as an individual problem, separate from the ethnicity, class and oblivious to gender inequalities, unaware of social networks and environment worlds of the patient and unaware of the continued bias to white males in pharmaceutical research for example (1). Yet, structural racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism, other life experiences and more are embedded in the causation of illness, the experience of illness and in the treatment of the person and their symptoms.
Not unrelatedly, an un-ecological isolated, atomised pervasive view persists, that you and I are separate from other types of people, and from the ‘out there’ that we call nature. I don’t remember it being said explicitly but like many ideas and ways in which we view the world, that peculiar idea of separateness, well it just seeps in. These ideas aren’t benign as they have real world impacts, they are painful and at the root of so much oppression.
We are all interconnected and a part of this world, We are all a part of the complex system of life. Although seemingly individual at times our dreams and experiences also contain information that belongs and should be processed in the collective, in communities and in teams. What’s interesting here is also how that although you and we might know this we forget and continue to unintentionally see others through this individual lense more often than not. By naming it, it can lose some power but like many bad ideas it doesn’t lie down and die.
I know through my personal experiences and discussions with colleagues, having several clients a day working on dreams over many years, and from running dream workshops that our dreams are often interconnected with those of others. Because we live in a shared social and cultural fields.
We are swimming in a social/cultural field, with its mix of structural oppressions, relational patterns, myths, histories and intergenerational traumas, bring with it a weave of nuance and complexity and the currents within in it and its messages and memes, filter into us.
For example, the culture (2) I grew up in is full of messages like these, which you might hear spoken but very often are internalised into inner dialogues or monologues :
Be successful, Work hard don’t be lazy
improve your situation, make an impact
Be useful, “fit in” be efficient have function
get things done,
perhaps you recognise these in the inner voices because they play out for many of us.
“keep your head down” “don’t be lazy” ” pull yourself together” “get on with it” “try harder”, “put on your brave face” “keep smiling”, “don’t fall behind”
and one of my all time bugbears the severely memetic, “Keep Calm and Carry On!”
You can think of more and add your own, but as you do so notice how they might be shared amongst many of us.
These ghostly whispers shape and bend us much of the time.
These ghostly whispers shape and bend us much of the time, when we don’t even realise they are doing so. They are entangled (3) with notions of empire, supremacy narratives, racism, sexism, ablism with long roots stretching back in time through feudalism, colonialism, the enlightenment, and neo-liberal capitalism.
Algorithmythicals
Algorithmythical is a blend word I made to help describe the persistent presence of these ideas. It is a mashup of the world algorithm, a term describing a set of rules and instruction and mythical, meaning the underlying patterns the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other.
They are algorithmic when they are like instructions when we are unconsciously moved and directed along our life-path by them, often without realising it.
They are mythical because they tap into stories and tropes and patterns of, for example, the hero who overcomes all odds. If you think you are the centre of the hero’s journey, that is all about you, about one central figure rather than what might be more interesting and more complex which is a story about all the figures or the in-betweens in the set of related connections. A story about the mentors, monsters, mix-ups and meddlers are all about parts of you and me too.
Because these algorithmythical processes are everywhere, they are also in the therapy room, in coaching, organisational or community work. For example, in psychotherapy, a profession of which I am a member and where the historic emphasis has focussed on the ideas based on correcting flaws in the client; healing individual trauma, releasing stuckness, mending wounds, reversing inadequacy and supporting self-development.
Algorithmythicals might play out consciously or unconsciously by emphasising the eradication or removal of our anxiety or depression, or relationship issues. The goal is for us to show a change, to alter our mood or function, to find our back into the world of work or family and play a role more efficiently in those roles expected of us. Maybe this list doesn’t seem too bad but what does the alternative look like?
Well there are other ways to approach this , a less common way but core to Processwork (amongst other methods) is to welcome disturbances and unfold them. That which first appears as a disturbance can be unfolded and through that process might in some way challenge the mis-functions and oppressive practices and patterns in our institutions and in the wider world.
When our institutions, governments, health systems are already so sick it is unsurprising that we ourselves might be depressed or anxious, raging or unfocused. Our efforts to change things might be mainstreamed into mediocrity and/or twisted so as to maintain power where it currently lies.
Collective Dreaming
When we unfold our dreams and disturbances in shared collective space, even though we might feel they are personal to us, we can move into purposeful, protest or activism out there on the street or into creating alternative patterns and projects.
Arny Mindell the founder of Processwork realised the need to develop methods for this and coined the term Worldwork to describe how we engage with these interconnections, turning outward whilst also working with one’s inner worlds. So processwork can be understood as an application, that compliments the interplay and mutuality of innerwork and worldwork.
And this is where the idea of collective dreaming can help. We can free ourselves from the insistence we have to single handily be the hero and save the world by having all the answers. By applying ourselves to relationship, community and a shared exploration of our dreams we can support novelty and emergence. In the process of being and dreaming together and in the context of the interconnected world, we can clash or meld our differences and then new insights appear.
Photo from the GoDeep Project – suggesting fields of interconnection and entanglement
Our hope is that through group work or seminars or community meetings or around the kitchen table, when we share our dreams (or symptoms (4)) something different can happen we find solidarity, something more sustaining, synergy, shared patterns and maybe shared solutions.
The deeper we go into dreams, the more we realise they can be like group processes, with different parts, images and patterns that take us far from our usual selves and gain perspective on the algorithmythicals, where they might work for us and for the whole and where they hinder or obfuscate.
By working on these collectively, through body and symptom work, group process, a deeper understanding of structural oppressions and more, we gain insights and awareness about what is trying to emerge in our lives, our relationships and what shared visions we might have for the future. Perhaps how to collaborate differently in this world.
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Awareness of how all the parts are interacting is key to the Worldwork paradigm and if you are interested in how to utilise the shared wisdom of our dreams, and difficulties to transform projects or help facilitate groups then the upcoming intensive training workshop in February 2025 might help. We will explore what is trying to emerge in our lives, in our projects, as new patterns that are shared with others. This intensive can also be taken as part of a longer two years Facilitation Training: Facilitating Our Future created with CFOR and which is now accepting applications.
Andy Smith (he/him) is a member of Processwork UK faculty. He is also a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor, training supervisor and faculty member of the Spanish Processwork training programme. He centres his work on transformational change in communities, organisations and participative democracy, inclusion and diversity. This has resulted in international awards for educational design at both university and grassroots levels, with awards for inclusivity, diversity, changing workplace practice, lifelong learning. A GENE award for global innovation in education was recently given to the Go Deep Project.
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(1) See The British Medical Journal 2020 BMJ 2020;371:m3808 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3808
(2) I grew up in a predominantly white working class industrial and religious community in south Wales.
(3) Like the machinations of “Wormtongue” the manipulative advisor to a King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings they exist as subtle, insidious, pervasive and, all encompassing set of imperatives that wash through us unconsciously and are then laid down into the fabric of our everyday lives. We consist of many parts for sure, yet in this story (and like in life) we probably prefer to identify with only some of the parts perhaps the hero warrior of the Once and Future King, but…we need to remember, we also have Wormtongue within us too.
(4) There is a dreaming process in our body experiences as well as in our night-time dreams.
