ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the overlap between neurology and psychoanalysis to affirm how it is the body that dreams, followed by an account of developments in clinical psychoanalytic work with dreams. It explores how a skin for dreaming may be enhanced in order to address the dissociated unconscious experiences. Sigmund Freud’s purpose was to draw attention to the way dreaming protected sleep so that the body and mind could recover through the skin of dreaming, while Wilfred Bion took Freud’s idea of a contact barrier further. Developing a skin for dreaming could be one way to describe not just social dreaming but the range of methodologies described as “socioanalytic methods”. Awakening contemplative intuitive thinking, encouraged by associations in social dreaming matrices, the space between left and right brained thinking may be bridged. The experience of hosting a social dreaming event, in an art gallery, was profoundly moving.
