Hello dreamers,
Laila, Megan, Ashish and David ate soup and bread at the studio this evening. Ashish had made leek and potato with garam masala, lemon, rosemary and salt, apparently too much salt… it was great, and the sourdough baguette complemented it well.
We had an interesting chat about the geopolitics in west Asia, aka Palestine, Israel…
Just after 6.30 we moved on to talking about dream ecologies…
Ashish asked each of us to talk about how it was at Merrivale. Megan said it allowed he to enter a dream space, there was sense that dreaming and daydreaming were somehow inseparable. Sorry Laila I forgot what you said here..
A few times during the evening the prospect of moving the Tuesday meeting online came up, after some though, and revisiting, it was decided not to move online, Ashish mentioned that this would cut Sarah out of Dream Ecologies. That felt bad and I don’t know how to resolve it. Sorry Sarah.
A question that surface in different ways several times in the evening was whether Dream Ecologies was still worth doing, raised mostly by Ashish, i think. I remember Ashish saying he had a long day and was not in the mood and wondered what the point of the evening would be because he wasn’t sure who would actually show up. He didn’t want to make soup or come away from his writing.
Ashish also expressed that there is a lot of material, scrolls, audio recordings, transcripts of dreams that has been generated but remains in stasis, feels like too much and not enough value realised or shared as a result..? Something like that?
He was also concerned about the workload of Laila and Megan as this is not a work day for them as part of Radical Ecology. I sort of summarised my perception of what we have done up to now and wondered if it could be possible to find funding to assimilate the data, with a view to establishing a dream commons, to give the raw date shape and then allow it to become realisable in the world.. give the collaborative collection and reflecting of dreams some agential value. Ashish responded that Dream Ecologies is the embarrassing bit of Radical Ecologies that he doesn’t tell funders about, there’s no proof of concept. Laila expressed that dream ecologies was the thing that attracted her to Radical Ecology, this instigated a discussion of how to actuate value and who could do that.
Laila spoke about the exciting prospect of bringing together movement and the dream space, Megan asked about whether it was a space to explore, to research or to practice. There was a discussion between Laila and Megan about practising dreaming or dream spacing (these are my words for a great bit of creative imagining that was in process of forming, so its hard to describe) that seemed to be premised on the assumption that dreaming and wakefulness are coexistent to a degree, that they blur and inform one another, that creative acts are possiblly connected to dream instances.. It felt to me like there was excitement around the prospect of bringing dreaming / day dreaming/ dream states in to art practice and into research practice. Laila used the term ‘weird’ and we picked up on that as a space unconformity, research and action.
We moved on to the practical matter of the next Public Matrix. Ashish fairly strongly wanted to cut things down to a minimum. So the next public Martix in two weeks 28th Oct will be indoors in the studio. No food. No script. People will be invited to spend the first half of the session writing dreams onto A4 sheets of paper. The second half speaking or reading dreams to be recorded and an AI transcript produced. (pls correct this if I got it wrong re. schedule for the evening)
Laila and Megan will bring a dream reflection activity to the nest organisational / collective in the studio 11th Nov, some kinda arts and craft collage reflection by action mash up. This sounded an exciting way to enter the space of reflection.
Laila and Megan will lead the following public matrix 25th Nov but this one may move to the weekend of 29th 30th so it can be during the day. It may become part of Radical Ecologies Saturday activities program.
Thank you for this evening Ashish, Laila, Megan.. great to chat.. Davidx