ABSTRACT
In May of 2003 we placed the following edited invitation in the Hay-on-Wye Festival catalogue of events:
The Hay-on-Wye Festival is a cultural space waiting for dreams to be dreamt .... People will gather together to focus on the novel, the poem, the performance. This focus will mirror the political and cultural ... pre-occupations of the contemporary world ....
The response of the audience develops and elaborates the creative process. This echoes the Social Dreaming Matrix where participation is a way of speaking freely and thinking out aloud ... and create ... the stimulus for more dreams ....
What is dreamt during the festival will create different metaphors and fresh ideas.... not in order to make the language fit the world but as an invention to experience our own contingency. There is no indisputable truth to be gleaned, the thing is the experience itself.
Like the matrix, the Festival is a container for reverie, just as a poem is a promise, evidence of things not seen.
132The following Matrix can be seen as a creative response to this invitation, which, simply put, asks “What is creativity?” Twenty people accepted the invitation and joined the Matrix having not experienced Social Dreaming before but brought together by their interest in the creative.