Susan Long clarifies what is “social” in Social Dreaming through a semiotic lens. She proposes a continuum from the raw dream (bodily/emotional impulses), to the dream as experienced (manifest content), to the dream as reported (shaped by personal history and the social unconscious), and finally to the dream extended in community. In a Social Dreaming Matrix, dreams and free associations become shared signs that generate social meaning; the matrix itself functions as the Peircean interpretant of a community’s unconscious, distinct from both the social and associative unconscious. The result is a method for transforming private dream material into resources for thinking about groups, organizations, and society.
