Introduction to Social Dreaming - Transforming Thinking. W. Gordon Lawrence,  Karnac, 2005

Social Dreaming as a means of understanding, a way of conceiving reality, has been with us since people have been able to share dreams. It describes a way of approaching dreams in order to share culture and knowledge together, and in this sharing our thinking is transformed, our creativity is enhanced, and new ideas emerge which would otherwise have remained submerged in the unconscious. As Lawrence points out in his recently published Introduction, he does not claim to have invented social dreaming, but rather to have discovered what had always been there but been lost in the twentieth century postindustrial age of mechanical logic, with its lines of sequential reasoning and emphasis on the use of our analytical conscious minds to the detriment of the unconscious as a socially useful tool, the unconscious being ‘relegated’, as it were, to the clinical, the purely personal and individualised encounter between analyst and analysand. This is one of the main themes in Lawrence's book, which is at its liveliest and most exciting in those chapters which deal with the aspects of creativity that emerge from the experience of social dreaming and where Lawrence shows himself to be a true practitioner of the very art he discovered, in an invigorating flow of innovation and imagination, the source of which can be traced to the realms of that same creativity of its author's mind which has emerged from the experience of over twenty years of social dreaming. For Lawrence, social dreaming is as much about an attitude to thinking as it is an opportunity for sharing dreams or a source of knowledge. It is about what Lawrence calls ‘the forging of an attitude of mind that is directed at discovery and is capable of registering wonderment and surprise’ (p. 22).

To the author's credit, and the reader's surprise, what this book is not about is a potted history of social dreaming. In fact, we are given the bare minimum about its history, three pages before Chapter 1, and even there we are t