dreamXchange ~
Guided Sessions
Guided Sessions
Formed around the practice of weekly dream sharing sessions 4 years ago the dreamXchange will continue its semi-public program during the winter months of 2024/25.
Four artists, researchers, healers, tricksters or mythical figures are invited to guide the participants through a 2-3 hour session loosely based on the structure of the regular dream sharing sessions and the speaker's own approach to (collective) dream work.
All sessions take place on the 0ct0p0s Discord server:
The program grows organically over time from the community that emerged around the sharing sessions.
Four artists, researchers, healers, tricksters or mythical figures are invited to guide the participants through a 2-3 hour session loosely based on the structure of the regular dream sharing sessions and the speaker's own approach to (collective) dream work.
All sessions take place on the 0ct0p0s Discord server:
The program grows organically over time from the community that emerged around the sharing sessions.
~~~
23. February 2025, 8:00-10:00 pm CET
Guided Session #7 – The Dreamer’s Mirror
Guided Session #7 – The Dreamer’s Mirror
An experiment in dissociating and relocating
This workshop explores the boundaries of personal and collective dreaming through an exercise designed to defamiliarize participants from their own sleep experiences. Dreams, intimate and deeply personal narratives, will be exchanged, mirrored, and transformed into shared new worlds, inviting participants to let go of ownership and imagine themselves in the place of another.
Participants will anonymously submit a brief description of a dream to the facilitator. Each dream will then be randomly reassigned to another participant, who will read it aloud as if it were their own. Seamlessly, the reader will expand the dream through improvisation, fabricating new details and directions, blurring the lines between memory, imagination, and storytelling.
Juliette Lange holds a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Wellesley College, where she developed a deep curiosity for the intersections of brain function, perception, and experience. An avid lucid dreamer, Juliette is fascinated by the fluid boundaries between waking life and dreams, exploring how human consciousness shapes personal realities. Her curiosities orbit the human experience of truth—how individuals construct and interpret their worlds through memory, language, and shared cultural narratives. Juliette seeks to understand the ways we navigate subjective and collective truths, inviting new perspectives on what it means to experience reality.
~~~
9. February 2025, 8:00-10:00 pm CET
Guided Session #6 – The Word for Their World is Fortress
Max HaivenCan we become the warlord’s nightmare?
How do fascist dreams come true? How do they become our dreams? How do we dream otherwise? On the one hand, fascists loathe and fear the tender anarchy of dreams. On the other, the violent realization of the dream emblematizes the fascist will to power.
In this session we consider the dreamworld/dreamwork of fascism through the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, specifically, her Nixon/Vietnam War-era novels The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Word for World is Forest (1972). In both, dreams are crucial anti-fascist media. In our own age of late capitalist warlordism, what role, if any, can dreams play? What would an anti-fascist dream game be?
Max Haiven is an educator who tries to use books, lectures, games, podcasts and other methods to understand and abolish capitalism and convoke the radical imagination. His most recent books are The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024) and Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022). He is founder and editor of VAGABONDS, a series of provocative pamphlets from Pluto Books. He is currently working on a book titled The Player and the Played: From Financialization to Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines.
~~~
For five years I have recorded myself mumbling dreams I just woke up from. I have used these recordings in therapy, for poetry, and performance writing. In this session I want to work with mumble dream voices to roleplay characters in a dream.
Here is how it works: Put your phone next to your bed. When you wake from a dream, record your voice half asleep re-narrating the dream. Do these recordings a week before the session. Bring one sample.
We will listen to our mumbling recordings. They are wonderfully embarrassing. Using Roleplay we will enact one dream as mumble characters. The dream world is no stronghold for coherent speech and logic. We will not depend on them. Come tired!
Elbe Trakal is a writer and researcher fascinated by what produces subjects in the here and now, the ideologies, the stories, and the collective thrust. His participatory dream score Under the covers, the waves! (2021) in collaboration with Jack Hogan was shown at the 7th Athens Biennial. Oneirotopia, a dream enactment workshop at Močvara Gallery in Zagreb. Elbe is co-founder of Mimesis Magazine, and fat vampire press. He sleeps in Berlin.The Opening is a meeting rooted in an ancient practice of working with dreams, further developed by my teachers: Catherine Shainberg and Bonnie Buckner. In the session, we will plunge into one recent night journey chosen from all the dreams brought to the meeting. Collectively, we will unravel a deeper meaning of the chosen dream and return it to the original dreamer to hear the resonance that our words bring.
Bring a recent dream, pen, crayons and paper – we will draw maps, hyperlink and connect across times and spaces.
Anna Nowicka is a Berlin/Brandenburg based choreographer and a dream coach. Her most recent performance, "The opening," where she live transforms audience’s dreams into instant choreographies, premiered on the 14th December 2023 in DOCK11 Berlin. Anna is a certified Saphire® teacher of Dr. Catherine Shainberg’s "The School of Images". She is a faculty at the "International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery", where she directs the Dream Your World® Kids program. www.mapsofdreaming.com
~~~
7. January 2024, 7:00-10:00 pm CET
Guided Session #3 – Fluid as Melting Ice
Fluid as Melting Ice invites participants to reflect on “non-interpretative” approaches to dreams and to unfold dream memories through a series of collaborative virtual experiments.
How can you be present with the traces of a dream without trying to interpret it? What arises when re-experiencing a dream through the act of writing, reading, listening, and drawing within a group? Can the process of transforming dream matter into various states be a nourishing practice of attuning to ourselves, others, and the world?
Participants are encouraged to bring a recent dream written by hand on paper that they feel comfortable sharing with others anonymously.
ONEIRIC SPACE is an ever-evolving research and publishing practice exploring the interplay of dreams and waking life at an individual and collective level. Our intention is to gather and share research, interviews, and stories that expand ways of seeing and engaging with dream life. Currently, ONEIRIC SPACE consists of gatherings, a newsletter, publications, and an online interview archive.
~~~
10. December 2023, 7:00-10:00 pm CET
Guided Session #2 – Dream Dungeon
Dream Dungeon is a Role Play Game that lets you explore a collective dreamscape.
The game starts with the sharing of dreams. Together we will then play a collectivized dreamer and the characters from our dreams. We re-enter our shared dream space in a social dreaming exercise and solve quests to uncover our communal undercurrents. The session is played on Discord as a group audio call.
Places are limited to 5 people.
Koma Somnus (*19987) is an artist, researcher and luminous shadow based in the oneirotopia of our collective dreamscapes. They can be embodied by different people.
~~~
An introduction to dreamwork – its methods and cosmologies – from the experience of a trainee, transpersonal psychotherapist.
Bea Xu will be drawing on case studies from peer-to-peer clinical work throughout their final year on the CCPE diploma: involving elemental magic, symbol association, energy tracking and the embodiment of a 7-year-long saga of shadow work. After the talk, there will be an experimental group activity, where attendees are invited to constellate tori of frequencies by associating with congruent ‘emotional tones’ from our dreams.
Bea Xu is a Chinese-British world-builder, ritualist and psychic worker based in London. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention they design and means-test integral, post-capitalist cosmologies with live participants and fellow LARPers. Bea's work can be seen as a narrative engagement with archetypal shadow – often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus. They have a private practice as an integrative, transpersonal psychotherapist while completing their training at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education (CCPE).
~~~