“As Within, So Without, As above, So below”

Hermes Trismegistus

We are forever edge-walking along a wild shoreline. The Great Sea of imagination is always close by, generously offering us what is needed for the journey.

Our dream tending at the Hive emerged from asking questions about care and relational health: How can we support imaginative sovereignty within groups in the service of healthy ecosystems? How can we tend understanding between people? And how can we hold space for the new?

The need for systemic healing extends all the way down into the human psyche. As the ancients, the alchemists and the psychoanalysts tell us, our most personal realities and intimate relational experience are deeply connected to our wider societal problems.

Dream tending listens to what lives within and between people in community and honours the living streams of spontaneous creativity inside each person. Across the run of the Hive we found value in relational practices that playfully released habits of control and marginalisation and opened up different, more welcoming ways of being together. At the Hive we held circle for participants and listened to what was present in the room, weaving a trust-based space open for all to contribute, feel solidarity and be changed through a process of mutual learning.

Kate Genevieve and Sarah Janes further extended this dream tending out to the mass protests in England in 2019 by inviting ecological activists to share their dreams as they campaigned for Systems Change. During the London protests, activists slept out in tents close to each other, creating an ad hoc mass dream incubation for the transformation of the workings of the city.

Kate created an installation to give a glimpse of the “live” group processes explored at the Hive. Working with glyphing and dream tending techniques learnt with Dr Apela Colorado, the experimental drawing installation creates one large image from the dreams collected.

The oneiroglyph of the group dream is not owned by anyone. The image emerged out of our entanglements as we participated in a whole-hearted experiment towards “informed dreaming for a better future”. The dreams collected contain shadow and possibility; abuse and betrayals, as well as creative inspirations for Systems Change.

Dream sharing can empower individuals and the group through tending a warm truth-telling accountable culture. At this crossroads in human history we are learning how vital it is to grow inclusive inspiring cultural containers, sturdy enough to support diverse people to work together for common societal changes.

Kate Genevieve Vega

Kate Genevieve Vega is an artist, director, researcher and educator at creative studio chroma.space. Her art and performance work shows nationally and internationally, most recently at Lumens London, Nimes, FACT Liverpool and the Flux Lab in collaboration with the Affective Sciences department at Biotech Geneva.

Vega’s art is grounded in original research into touch and multi-sensory communication through her Doctoral study at the University of Sussex. Embracing the sense that questions of mental, social and environmental ecology do not simply inform each other, but depend on each other, she works with social neuroscience to explore creative imagination and shared experience.

Kate is passionate about creative culture and works with diverse networks on creative activism and supporting community wisdom. In 2018 Kate trained as a Warm Data Lab facilitator to host conversations on complexity in communities towards activating ecological thinking and has taught Creative Media Practice at MA and BA level.

Sarah Janes

Sarah Janes is an independent sleep and dream researcher based in Hastings. Her particular interests are in the dream culture of the ancient world, dream memory and lucid dreaming and an active supporter of the Hive experiment.

Sarah has written about dreams and presented research for The Idler, The Bohemian, The Journal of Paranthropology and Ancient Origins.

Sarah regularly talks at events and conferences on the subject and hosts dream workshops.