01.03.2023 Views

Dreamlands - AW22–23 booklet digital PDF

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

introduction


This is the second edition of the seasonal <strong>Dreamlands</strong><br />

publication, featuring collaborative ceramic works and<br />

a soundpiece made through community workshops in<br />

Glasgow’s Southside over Autumn and Winter 2022-23.<br />

This edition includes an essay reflecting on a year of<br />

community dream sharing, linking the recurring images<br />

of water voiced by the dreamers to the notion of ‘oceanic<br />

feeling’ and its political implications. This body of work<br />

considers expressions of dreams as communicative<br />

gestures that can operate as a form of social and political<br />

action.<br />

<strong>Dreamlands</strong> is a on-going research project by artist Mina<br />

Heydari-Waite, weaving together ideas arising in<br />

collaboration and conversation with the dreamlands<br />

pottery (a group of women* from global majority<br />

backgrounds**) and in walking together we make the path<br />

(a social dreaming workshop open to people of<br />

marginalised genders***). The project asks: can the act of<br />

sharing our dreams create possibilities for new thought<br />

about how we occupy space in our shared waking world?<br />

<strong>Dreamlands</strong> is a Govanhill Baths Culture Collective project,<br />

interpreting the theme of OCCUPY! through socially<br />

engaged artistic practice.<br />

* our use of the word women is inclusive of trans and intersex women, and<br />

non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience<br />

of women.<br />

**global majority is a collective term that refers to people who are Black, Asian,<br />

Brown, mixed-heritage and/or indigenous to the global south.<br />

***my use of the phrase marginalised genders includes transgender women,<br />

cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary people, and other gender<br />

identities that have been systematically oppressed by those in power, both<br />

historically and in the present.


in walking<br />

together we<br />

make the path


A collective of voices weave together a sensorial<br />

soundscape, using fragments drawn from a series of social<br />

dreaming* workshops open to people of marginalised<br />

genders in the Southside of Glasgow. We gathered together<br />

on cold Tuesday nights in a dimly lit community space, our<br />

voices blending to create a shared, constellated dream.<br />

How might our individual dreams manifest if we treat them<br />

as contributions to a shared imagining of the world?<br />

The Autumn Winter 2022-23 dreamers include Charlotte<br />

Bickley, Lisa Bradley, Fibi Cowley, Fi Halliday, Kirstin<br />

Halliday, Mina Heydari-Waite, Ane Lopez, Molly Mae<br />

Whawell, Sarah Martin, Erica Monde, Mindy Ptolomey,<br />

Johanna Saunderson, Catherine Somerville, Muna Sultan,<br />

Lucy Watkins and Sam Wood. The sound piece was created<br />

by Mina Heydari-Waite, alongside producer Ane Lopez and<br />

sound designer William Aikman.<br />

Does anyone have a dream that they would like to share?<br />

*social dreaming is a reflective practice in which people share their dreams and<br />

associated thoughts, layering a collaborative collage of images, ideas, cultural<br />

references and feelings.


Mmmm<br />

close up - and then he suddenly looks like<br />

someone else.<br />

It was this tiny tunnel that went under this, like maybe,<br />

six metre by nine metre boulder and it involved<br />

crawling through this puddle. And you could only just<br />

fit through it. So you had to… kind of trust<br />

that someone else had done this before you and there<br />

was a pathway through.<br />

I was inside a toilet cubicle at work and as I was about<br />

to go back outside I couldn’t remember where I was or<br />

what I was doing there.<br />

I’m on the platform of a subway station, and the<br />

platform starts tilting and becoming very, very<br />

slippery.<br />

And I start sliding very slowly<br />

towards the train tracks. No-one around me notices,<br />

not even when I reach the very edge of the platform.<br />

There were these two people that were across on the<br />

other side of the space that we were in, and they were<br />

submerged in water. The water was quite choppy and<br />

there were a few of us trying to get towards them…<br />

or then we were trying to use a piece of string, to try<br />

and pull them towards us.<br />

Wait!<br />

They weren’t there, but you know, that way you can<br />

just tell that they had been there recently. And there<br />

was a note on a door in the bedroom saying, do<br />

not open. And in my head I’m like, it’s probably just<br />

cleaning supplies. But, I had to open the door. And<br />

there was a whole other flat beyond the door.<br />

I just couldn’t settle her. She started making this funny<br />

shape with her mouth, but no noise was coming out.<br />

Everybody is talking, speaking. I don’t know who’s<br />

sitting behind and who’s coming or going.<br />

Something’s going wrong and I can’t remember what.<br />

I would always wake up to them and think that they were<br />

laughing.<br />

I knew something was off, it didn’t seem like my cat.<br />

But they all kept telling me it was.<br />

Like when I’m looking at this person’s face very<br />

The elevator stops at a floor, but it’s only half the size.<br />

A half floor.<br />

The lift simulated what it would be like in an<br />

earthquake, with the floor shaking. I remember<br />

being completely appalled that no adult had<br />

told me that this is something that could<br />

happen.


And I do feel guilty. I’m like physically hurting him. Not on<br />

purpose, but like I’ll make a mistake and then something<br />

will happen to him.<br />

We’d never told each other that we’d had these<br />

strange dreams about the middle landing before.<br />

And as soon as we spoke about it, the feeling<br />

disappeared.<br />

We had these caterpillars delivered in the post and<br />

raised them, which was actually very useful for<br />

tracking time. The butterflies emerged and we thought<br />

it would be romantic to let one out of the window…<br />

this butterfly floated down from the second floor,<br />

and it landed on the grass below for a split second,<br />

until this crow came down and ate it.<br />

It wasn’t uncomfortable to start with. It was a<br />

little mound, a kind of a rocky crag I suppose.<br />

I was trying to work out what the best way to<br />

go around it was. And I ended up climbing over<br />

the top because it looked the most fun. There<br />

was all this moss and these rocks, and then<br />

these crows, which were kind of taxidermied<br />

into the rocks. I was wriggling over it and my<br />

bare belly was feeling the crows beaks.<br />

Um, my bottom tooth is loose, and I can feel… I don’t know<br />

if you remember the jelly bit that you would get. I am trying<br />

to push the tooth back into the hole. I can’t figure out why<br />

I can’t put it back in. And I pull it out to look and where the<br />

base of the tooth should be, there is a tiny little skull.<br />

I yawned and my jaw<br />

dislocated. It was pitch black<br />

in my room.<br />

He asks this young woman to teach him and his wife how<br />

to swim, but they don’t have any access to a pool. So they<br />

do the front crawl on the carpet and breath training in a<br />

bowl of water and swim their way around their apartment.<br />

I’m in this swimming pool. There’s been a murder, and<br />

the evidence is this smashed figurine stuck<br />

in the pool filter. This wheeler dealer lawyer is kind of<br />

representing me - but he is also Owen Wilson,<br />

the actor.<br />

Every time I look at him, his hair changes, a floppy<br />

mop, a tight perm - oh look! half his moustache has<br />

disappeared. I notice my sandals are rimmed with<br />

blood. Maybe I am the murderer.<br />

I deflect the blame, and then this pool attendant tells<br />

me to stop pointing the finger. I just loose my rag at<br />

him. I’m screaming, and while I don’t push him, the<br />

force of the conflict drives him back.<br />

Did someone put this in my bag?<br />

Somebody has given me this, this child, this<br />

young boy - he is darting all over the place, so<br />

fast that I just can’t contain him.<br />

I have a tiny, tiny, tiny bird living on my palm, so small that


it gets lost in the folds of my hand. It has chicks so small<br />

they are just black specks. I am trying to feed them using<br />

the end of a pin. Eventually they all die, apart from the<br />

father bird who I keep in a tea strainer.<br />

Now everything shifts, and I manage to catch<br />

him in this brown paper bag.<br />

What is it that you lost?<br />

My arm just felt like a foreign object.<br />

She told me that a bear had shredded her whole<br />

house, she described her house as being like, made of<br />

paper.<br />

The light was everywhere. I was scared that he was gonna<br />

die in Pakistan. And when 40 years later, I got the phone<br />

call, I was stuck in the traffic on a dark night and yet again,<br />

there was light everywhere.<br />

The waters rapidly rose from the river, right up into<br />

the windows of the house and then completely<br />

submerged the living room.<br />

Um, and one time I was speaking to my ex-girlfriend on<br />

the phone, I was 19, so it was all very torturous. I walked<br />

into my bedroom on the phone and without thinking<br />

pulled back the curtain. And there was a man standing<br />

there looking at me. I opened the door and he just ran.<br />

There were these two whales, like blue whales, but<br />

the size of orcas. They swam into the living room. The<br />

water is very dark, and I’m looking for my little cousin.<br />

And then these two little dismembered legs pop up.<br />

It almost didn’t sound like a train anymore, it<br />

just sounded like some sort of animal.<br />

We can hear the rumblings every time it goes past. And<br />

sometimes I lie awake thinking about the hole caving in.<br />

A hole appeared in the ceiling and there was<br />

water coming in and mushrooms growing<br />

from the wallpaper.<br />

It’s kind of made me feel differently about what might<br />

be possible. I was part of some sort of ceremony. I<br />

wasn’t really there as a person. I was there as a kind of<br />

container. And I had to kind of like… hug is not really<br />

the right word, but kind of enfold this person.<br />

It’s like the sensation of someone<br />

coming from behind me and<br />

embracing me.<br />

Hmmm<br />

I don’t remember what the game was, but the prize<br />

was like… they were, um, they were a pearl that<br />

was inside a big shell. It was really beautiful… kind<br />

of glistening. And then they unzipped themselves<br />

out of the pearl and unfurled.


Ermmmm…<br />

There was a performance happening in a wooden cubicle.<br />

They got us all to come in and locked the doors. Then<br />

they said, “Now get naked”. And I was like, “No, I’m not<br />

getting naked”. And they were like, “Well, you can’t leave”.<br />

And then I said, ‘I’m having a panic attack”. So I crawled<br />

out underneath the door of the cubicle. I was so angry.<br />

But then, when the door opened… I saw the performance<br />

kind of dissipating; it was all dark, there were all these<br />

butterflies and beautiful naked bodies. And I thought,<br />

“Oh no, I think I kind of missed out now”. But I was still<br />

kind of enraged.<br />

It felt like my bed had slowly tipped and I was sliding<br />

out of it.<br />

I never really landed.<br />

I arrive at the ferry port and I’ve missed the<br />

ferry.<br />

And the water is churning<br />

and the ferry is moving further and further<br />

away.<br />

And the teacher, I remember her particularly hating me<br />

for some reason, asked, “How do you not know that<br />

you’re not dreaming now?”<br />

pottery<br />

the dreamlands


A group of eight women from global majority backgrounds<br />

met fortnightly over 2022 to use clay as a means to think<br />

about dreams and talismans. We came together in different<br />

combinations - as work, school holidays, illness and life’s<br />

various chores and crises allowed - and slowly over the<br />

months we coiled, carved, extruded, poured, buffed and<br />

glazed a body of collaborative work. We talked about<br />

letting the clay lead and about intuitive, sensory, collective<br />

making. We reflected on the ways in which vessels can<br />

carry stories. We thought about special symbols and<br />

charmed objects. We shared the occasional dream. The<br />

transformative processes of working with ceramics<br />

together yielded unexpected results: some objects came<br />

out from their final firings shimmering; others cracked or<br />

warped, their glazes running to fuse pot shard to kiln shelf.<br />

The outcomes of our year of pottering remind us that clay,<br />

like life, often overtakes the plans we impose on it. The<br />

following images document the series of totemic objects<br />

that emerged from the dreamlands pottery.<br />

The <strong>Dreamlands</strong> potters are Syeda Sadaf Anwar, Hanaa<br />

Ahmad, Lottie Brand, Nina Candido, Lydia Gitamvu, Mina<br />

Heydari-Waite, Shanaz Miah and Yas Rahemtulla. The<br />

art direction for the documentation of the group’s work<br />

was by Mina Heydari-Waite, with photography by Jess<br />

Holdengarde and floral design by Molly Mae Whawell.<br />

Photograph of the workshop by Erika Stevenson


we dive, we float,<br />

we drift, we are<br />

swept away and<br />

under…


we dive, we float, we drift, we are swept away and under…<br />

social dreams in Glasgow’s Southside<br />

Mina Heydari-Waite<br />

An essay reflecting on a year of social dreaming<br />

workshops in Glasgow’s Southside, linking the recurring<br />

images of water voiced by the dreamers to the notion of<br />

‘oceanic feeling’ and its political implications.<br />

Thanks to the dreamers who contributed to in<br />

walking together we make the path over 2022 and to<br />

psychotherapist, social dreaming practitioner and<br />

dramatist Laurie Slade for his mentorship during the<br />

development of my ideas around social dreaming.<br />

I sink down on the black plumes of sleep; its thick wings<br />

are pressed to my eyes […] Oh, to awake from dreaming!<br />

Look, there is the chest of drawers. Let me pull myself<br />

out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me;<br />

they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am<br />

turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long<br />

lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with<br />

people pursuing, pursuing.<br />

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (2000: 14)<br />

On the last Tuesday of the month, I meet with a group of<br />

people in the Southside of Glasgow to share dreams in a<br />

workshop called in walking together we make the path.<br />

The workshop, which has been running since March 2022,<br />

is inspired by social dreaming, a reflective practice in<br />

which people share their dreams and associated thoughts,<br />

weaving together a collaborative collage of images, ideas,<br />

memories and feelings. It’s a free associative process that<br />

seeks to put our ‘rationally’ defined reality in conversation<br />

with our dreaming minds, offering potential for new<br />

perspectives to arise. I am an artist and I host these<br />

workshops as part of an ongoing line of practice-based<br />

research, developing seasonal, episodic soundscapes in<br />

which members of the workshop voice fragments of one<br />

another’s dreams.<br />

The reciprocal relationships between our dreams, our<br />

waking socialities and the representation of dreams<br />

are complex and porous. Dreaming is not exclusively a<br />

private affair, as social dreaming practitioner Laurie Slade<br />

describes: ‘[...] dreams speak of the social realities we are<br />

embedded in - as families, as groups, as communities,<br />

as cultures – as much as they speak of the inner life of<br />

a dreamer’ (2021: 3). With this in mind, the aim of social<br />

dreaming is not to interpret a dream for an individual<br />

dreamer; instead, as with many indigenous traditions, but


to consider a dream as part of a collective matrix. At the<br />

heart of social dreaming is the idea that, through sharing<br />

our dreams, we can create possibilities for new thought<br />

about our shared social context and issues concerning us<br />

collectively.<br />

When it works, when it flows, the workshop operates like<br />

a shared, constellated dream in its own right. Waves of<br />

shared feeling, reverie, mood and tone wash through the<br />

group. Our voices blend, it becomes hard to distinguish<br />

who says what; the dreams become a torrent, tumbling<br />

over one another. In later discussions, dreams from<br />

the group are often misattributed: I was particularly struck<br />

by one participant who was surprised to learn that a<br />

dream they believed they had shared, had actually been<br />

voiced by someone else.<br />

As I prepared for the last workshops of 2022, I had<br />

been researching the notion of ‘oceanic feeling’, and<br />

reading Virginia Woolf’s 1931 The Waves, a novel that she<br />

described as a ‘play-poem’, in which she reflects the fluid<br />

boundaries of selfhood in the water-rhythms of her prose.<br />

Submerged beneath the voices of Woolf’s characters,<br />

there is continuity that resists the atomising orders of<br />

wakefulness, a sense that she later outlined in an essay,<br />

A Sketch of the Past: ‘the whole world is a work of art;<br />

that we are parts of the work of art; we are the music; we<br />

are the thing itself’ (1990: 81). In The Waves, we see one<br />

character, Bernard, ask: ‘“Who am I?” I have been talking<br />

of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am<br />

I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know’ (2000:<br />

162-3).<br />

‘Oceanic feeling’ is a term conceived by Romain Rolland<br />

in a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, in which Rolland draws<br />

upon his experience of mystic traditions to describe a<br />

‘sensation of eternity; of being one with the external world<br />

as a whole’ (Masson, 2012: 33). For Rolland, oceanic feeling<br />

is the affect that ebbs beneath spiritual experiences,<br />

characterised by a sense of boundless porosity that<br />

dissolves the hard boundaries between the self and the<br />

rest of the world. My understanding of the oceanic has<br />

been influenced by poet and scholar Jackie Wang’s essay<br />

Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect (2016), in which<br />

she explores the social implications of oceanic states,<br />

asking whether they have the potential to aid collectivised<br />

social modes. In my practice, I have found that the idea<br />

of oceanic feeling parallels the affective properties and<br />

generative possibilities of dream states. Both speak to a<br />

primary interconnectedness, the fluidity of networks, and,<br />

in opposition to their cognate binaries of dry land and the<br />

waking world, a sense of vast possibility that challenges<br />

the boundaries of individual subjectivity, linking us to more<br />

collective modes of thought.<br />

Oceanic feeling was dismissed by Freud as an echo of the<br />

lesser consciousnesses of the infant, who is incapable<br />

of distinguishing between themselves, other people and<br />

the rest of the material world. As Wang traces in her essay,<br />

Freud’s conceptualisation of oceanic feeling as infantile<br />

regression was expanded by analyst Julia Kristeva in Black<br />

Sun, as ‘a hallucinated completeness’ linked with female<br />

melancholia; a ‘lethal ocean’ in which the disintegration<br />

of the discrete self is linked to madness and obliteration<br />

(2016). Some of these more compromising affects of<br />

the oceanic are also evoked by the dream from The Waves<br />

that opens this piece: ‘[…] these waves, these endless<br />

paths, with people pursuing […]’. Wang identifies other<br />

schools of thought that reveal Kristeva and Freud’s views<br />

as reductive; however, in step with Kristeva’s identification<br />

of the negative connotations of the oceanic, I recognise<br />

that during the in walking together workshops, feelings<br />

of danger, particularly in relation to dissolution of the<br />

self, have often been expressed through images of water:<br />

‘And you know, I was seeing water every second day.<br />

I’m drowning. I see so much water’ (in walking together


dreamer, 2022). This dreamer echoed Woolf’s description<br />

of a desire to pull themselves ‘out of these waters’: ‘[…]<br />

even though I usually don’t go to the mosque or anything,<br />

I phoned and said, my dreams were okay, but now I’m<br />

drowning’ (in walking together dreamer, 2022). The fear of<br />

being washed away feels all the more potent in a city like<br />

Glasgow, a city shaped by water, carved by the river Clyde<br />

and flattened by a notorious amount of rain. In the 19th<br />

century, the ‘second city’ of the British Empire built<br />

a fifth of that empire’s ships on the banks of Clyde, and its<br />

complex colonial history feeds into its rapid decline as a<br />

major industrial centre and its subsequent shifting urban<br />

identity. I remember the first week I moved to the Southside<br />

of Glasgow, after navigating a flooded drainage gully on<br />

my way home from work, I checked flood maps to gauge<br />

when my first floor tenement flat might be submerged. Is it<br />

any wonder the city’s fluctuating water levels are reflected<br />

in the rising waters of our dreams?<br />

I spoke to Laurie Slade about the more threatening aspects<br />

of the oceanic, and he drew my attention to how these<br />

anxieties feed into a repeated rhythm. This pattern is<br />

often reflected in the rhythm of social dreaming sessions<br />

themselves; we can be anxious to enter the waters, we<br />

enter the collective flow and then, at the end of a session,<br />

we get back onto dry land,tingling. This sense of a<br />

generative, cyclical water-rhythm is reminiscent of Wang’s<br />

description of the work of psychoanalyst Marion Milner.<br />

Milner saw dipping into oceanic states as an essential part<br />

of the creative process, if one can use the subsequent<br />

tingling animation to ‘make something’:<br />

In order to transform the oceanic state into an aesthetic<br />

object the artist must oscillate between different modes<br />

of perception and awareness because the oceanic<br />

state, like dream states, resists signification. In other<br />

words, the writer or artist must “submerge” and then<br />

come to the surface for air.<br />

Wang on Milner, Oceanic Feeling and Communist<br />

Affect (2016)<br />

Throughout the in walking together workshops, water was<br />

omnipresent. In our dreams, we dived, floated, drifted, were<br />

swept away and under seas, viscous liquids and pools<br />

that ‘went metres and metres and metres down’ (in walking<br />

together dreamer, 2022). While, at times, the ocean did<br />

indeed feel lethal, it was also often sensual, joyful, sublime.<br />

Often, the affect induced by what I categorise as ‘the<br />

watery dreams’ was fluid and changing:<br />

We were trying to walk along this beach together in this<br />

howling, howling wind and rain that was just getting<br />

stronger and stronger… and we all had umbrellas,<br />

walking together like Roman soldiers with their shields,<br />

like a tortoise. We came to this huge bridge – like the<br />

golden gate bridge but bigger – and we were struggling<br />

to get across. I didn’t know where we were going or<br />

where we were coming from. The water from the sky<br />

kept coming down and the water underneath the bridge<br />

began to rise. And it became quite clear that we were all<br />

really in peril and that we might not make it across. All of<br />

a sudden this huge wave came, swept us off the bridge<br />

and woke us up. And then we were all in a community<br />

centre together, asking, “Do you think we made it? Do<br />

you think we made it across the bridge?<br />

in walking together we make the path dreamer, 2022<br />

Anticipatory longings and communal desires overflow<br />

themselves in the act of reaching towards their supposed<br />

destination. Heraclitis’ notion that ‘a man never steps in


the same river twice, for the river is not the same river<br />

and the man is not the same man’ comes to mind (Barnes,<br />

2982: 49). Heraclitis’ use of water as a metaphor for life<br />

flow, for a continuous, fluid process of becoming, is<br />

conjured up by this dream: ‘[...] the water from the sky kept<br />

coming down and the water beneath the bridge began to<br />

rise [...]’ (in walking together dreamer 2022). While states<br />

that threaten the boundaries of the discrete self can feel<br />

perilous, they also have a powerful generative potential. As<br />

Rolland framed it, the oceanic is not simply a regressive<br />

return, but ‘part of a mature process of becoming; an<br />

experience of ego loss that enables one to commune with<br />

the “substance” of existence in a way that radically alters<br />

one’s orientation to the world’ (Wang, 2016). In the dream<br />

above, the undefined ‘we’ emerges from the wave that<br />

‘swept us off the bridge and woke us up’ to ask: ‘do you<br />

think we made it?’ ‘We’ are enveloped in the flow, and there<br />

is always a danger (for all of us) that we might not make it.<br />

The waters rapidly rose from the river, right up into the<br />

windows of the house and then completely submerged<br />

the living room. There were these two whales, like blue<br />

whales, but the size of orcas. They swam into the room.<br />

The water is very dark and very deep, and I’m looking for<br />

my wee cousin. And then these two little dismembered<br />

legs pop up.<br />

in walking together we make the path dreamer, 2022<br />

dream is shared it takes on ‘a collective value and social<br />

significance’ (Schmitt, 1999: 274-275). I’ve been reflecting<br />

on how the experience of being socially marginalised, of<br />

having needs that go unmet and voices that are ignored<br />

at systemic levels, might influence how we remember and<br />

share our dreams. Are those marginalised in the waking<br />

world more disposed to dream of new emancipatory<br />

socialities? In The Waves, it is the figure of Rhoda<br />

who operates as an oceanic dreamer, struggling to<br />

distinguish between herself and the rest of the world, her<br />

boundlessness is othered (as mysticism or madness) and<br />

her dreaming is silenced, first through social alienation and<br />

then through death by drowning. If one effect of dreaming<br />

is the ability to conceptualise alternative representations<br />

of things we have trouble picturing or articulating (both<br />

to ourselves and others) – to start thinking through some<br />

of the ‘unthinkably’ difficult struggles of our social lives<br />

(Sliwinski, 2017) – what gushes out when we unblock a<br />

dam?<br />

There were these two people that were across on the<br />

other side of the space that we were in, and they were<br />

like submerged in water, and there was like a few of us<br />

trying to go towards them or, um, get a piece of material<br />

or string to try to pull them towards us. And the water<br />

was quite choppy. Moving, filling this space.<br />

in walking together we make the path dreamer, 2022<br />

The in walking together workshops are open to people of<br />

marginalised genders (women and intersex, transgender<br />

and non-binary people); people whose gender identities<br />

have been oppressed by patriarchal systems, both<br />

historically and in the present. I wonder how this shapes<br />

our shared dream culture (the beliefs, values and<br />

practices of a group of dreamers). From the moment a<br />

Rolland emphasised ‘the energising effect of the oceanic<br />

orientation on social and political action’ (Wang, 2016).<br />

What if, like Wang, we asked what it might mean to<br />

socialise oceanic feeling, starting in our own communities?<br />

One way to do this may be through practices like social<br />

dreaming, where the expression of dreams can be a means<br />

of challenging our hegemonic rationalities. Frantz Fanon


offered us a compelling characterisation of the dream<br />

as a zone in which to develop emancipatory, decolonial<br />

thought (Fanon, 2001: 15). There are many historical<br />

precedents where dreams have been used to radical ends,<br />

as in the testimony of Plenty Coups of the Indigenous<br />

American Crow Nation, who shared a dream-vision with<br />

his community in order to imagine a way to continue in<br />

the face of cultural genocide – and, later, to begin a crosscultural<br />

dialogue with colonisers (Lear, 2006). In this<br />

light, dream sharing is a particular kind of communicative<br />

gesture that ‘can serve as a potent form of political<br />

intervention’, a means of resisting sovereign power<br />

(Sliwinski, 2017: xiii).<br />

We are driving down Kenmure Street. Then we turn into<br />

this big black warehouse with a plain door. We open the<br />

door and walk down these steps leading to this almost<br />

Roman bath like thing, with big stone columns… and<br />

then water was coming up to my calves. I was wearing<br />

these wellies, and I could feel the cold water seeping in.<br />

I knew it couldn’t be real, and I knew I was really feeling<br />

the water.<br />

incredible act of radical imagination. If we want to nurture<br />

modes of political thought capable of ‘creating openings<br />

where there were previously none,’ the aesthetics of<br />

dreams are vital (Wang, 2021). Woolf knew this, and used<br />

the evocation of dreaming and oceanic affect to undermine<br />

the ‘Western valorisation of individual selfhood’ she saw as<br />

fuelling the British imperialist project (Marcus 1997: 155).<br />

The social implications of oceanic and dream states have<br />

the potential to draw us towards an acceptance that we<br />

are all tumbled together in Rolland’s ocean, Heraclitis’<br />

flow, Woolf’s waves, and the choppy waters of our shared,<br />

social dreams. The radical potential of these states to tap<br />

into the porous consciousness of a community is redolent<br />

in the recurring image of water, which points to a sense of<br />

the oceanic as a goal or an aim. In these understandings,<br />

perhaps we can imagine new ways to resist the structures<br />

and states that atomise us, and flow together in the world<br />

we share? If not in a great flow, then perhaps in many<br />

trickles. The dream above was shared ten months after the<br />

Kenmure Street protest, and now, another ten months later,<br />

I can still feel the water seeping in, calling its dreamers<br />

towards acts of radical imagination.<br />

in walking together we make the path dreamer, 2022<br />

In our dreams we know that the ‘not real’ can also be(come)<br />

real. Kenmure Street, in the Southside of Glasgow, is a site<br />

of recent collective action that marked a historic victory for<br />

our community. Early on the morning of the 13th May 2021,<br />

during Eid al-Fitr, a dawn immigration raid resulted in two<br />

of our long-term neighbours being taken from their homes<br />

and detained in an Home Office van. The community, of<br />

which the in walking together dreamers are part, responded<br />

with a spontaneous sit-in protest, surrounding the van for<br />

eight hours until –in an unprecedented turn of events – the<br />

men were released. Our neighbours came together in an


References<br />

Barnes, Jonathan. The Natural Philosophy of Heraclitus. In The Presocratic<br />

Philosophers, p. 43–62. London & New York: Routledge, 1982.<br />

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books, 2001.<br />

Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.<br />

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006.<br />

Marcus, Jane. Britannia Rules The Waves. In Jane Goldman (ed) Icon Critical<br />

Guides: To the Lighthouse, The Waves, p. 149–159. Cambridge: Icon Books,<br />

1997.<br />

Schmitt, Jean Claude. The Liminality and Centrality of Dreams in the Medieval<br />

West. In Shulman, D. and G. G. Stroumsa (eds) Dream Cultures: Explorations in<br />

Comparative History of Dreaming, p. 274–287. Oxford: Oxford University Press,<br />

1999.<br />

Slade, Laurie. Dreams in search of a dreamer: Concepts, praxis and potentials<br />

of social dreaming. Paper for Faculty of Medical Psychotherapy – Royal<br />

College of Psychiatrists Annual Conference, 2021.<br />

Sliwinski, Sharon. Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought.<br />

Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.<br />

Wang, Jackie. Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect. Available at: https://<br />

loneberry.tumblr.com/post/153995404787/oceanic-feeling-and-communistaffect?is_related_post=1<br />

[Accessed: 25th August 2022]. 2016.<br />

Wang, Jackie. The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void. New<br />

York: Nightboat Books, 2021.<br />

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. London: Grafton, 1990.<br />

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2002.


Design by Phoebe Kerr

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!