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John Clare and Ali Zarbafi, London, Karnac Books, 2009, 211 pp., £21.99 (paperback)
A new book on social dreaming is very welcome. This book is written by two psychotherapists, and social dreaming matrix (SDM) facilitators, John Clare and Ali Zarbafi. There is also a third writer mentioned, namely Jane Storr who wrote the Addendum in Chapter 5. In their acknowledgements, the authors want to show their appreciation to all the participants (hundreds of them) at the Hay-on-Wye Festival who shared their dreams by writing or telling them during a 10-day period in May/June 2005. The authors explain that the book is based on their social dreaming research which started in 2000. The data was collected in different SDM and workshops, such as the annual Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 2003 and 2004, a young people's community centre in London, social dreaming conferences in Southern France and at different venues with refugee workers, psychotherapists, children and academics. As this book is based on research findings, I would have liked to have a clearer description (even as an appendix) of how the research was conducted (e.g. how data was collected; how many dreams were collected in May/June 2005 at the literary festival, etc.). It would be important to know whether or not participants were asked for their permission to collect data on their dreams; how much data did the authors collect?; what were the author's views on confidentiality and informed consent?, etc. Simply, a clear idea of methodology would have been welcome. My main reason to ask these questions is primarily because the context of the book is very much based on dreams (i.e. qualitative data) and it would have been instructive to bring some quantitative data (i.e. ages of respondents, gender, employment, etc.) to balance their work and, most importantly, to give a clearer picture of the research methodology overall.
Gordon Lawrence, the founder of social dreaming has written the Foreword for the book. He explai