Season 4, Episode 15: Climate Arts and Social Dreaming with Kamila Kuc and Julian Manley
Season 4, Episode 15: Climate Arts and Social Dreaming with Kamila Kuc and Julian Manley
Thomas and Panu connected with Julian Manley and Kamila Kuc who joined in from Scotland and London to explore the intersections of climate change, emotions and the arts. Kamila and Julian described their recent collaboration using the practice of social dreaming, a group process to discuss and find larger meaning, emotional reality, and direction from personal dreams. Hosting social dreaming gatherings is a powerful way to foster community dialogue about eco and climate emotions and support artistic practices such as poetry and film making. They had a rich dialogue about art, action, and ways to envision nature as an active participant in our collective dreams.
Links
Social Dreaming Workshop: Cadence 2025 – Reimagining Climate Futures: Creative Practices for Social Change
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.
Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, this is our podcast. It’s a show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and
other environmental issues. We talk about a lot of topics on this podcast. Our mission is to probe what it means to be happy in the modern world. We talk about our environmental values, beliefs, feelings, identity. And also, interesting endeavors and people who are working in different places on different interesting projects. We’re really glad and happy to have two very special and interesting guests today. Julian Manley is someone that we know who’s associated with this idea of social dreaming, which we’ll talk about. And he’s coming in from Scotland. And Kamila Kuc is a very interesting filmmaker who I know through various channels and who’s also now moving into studying and doing work around climate change, eco-therapy, climate therapy. So, we have both of these folks together, and there’s a number of connections with Julian and Kamila’s work to guests that we’ve had on this podcast and writing and work that Panu’s been doing. So, it’s a neat sort of personal and professional connection today. Panu, do you want to get us started?
Pihkala: Warm welcome also on my behalf. I’m very pleased to have you on our podcast.
We usually ask people something about their journeys towards engagement with climate change matters, whether that is via psychology or arts or social dreaming or many possibilities. But perhaps starting with Julian, would you like to tell us something about your journey? How did you become engaged with these topics?
Julian Manley: I was born in England and brought up in France, my mother is French, and then I lived for a while in Spain and now I’m back in Scotland and I think that moving around from place to place opens up your mind to different cultures and different environments. I studied English at university and that brought me into contact with the Romantic poets and through the Romantic poets, I began to have a specific and special interest in the connection between the human and the natural world. And since then, I’ve just developed those thoughts and ideas. I’ve become a director of the Climate Psychology Alliance and been very interested in understanding how psychology and psychoanalytical ideas can bring you closer to a relationship with nature. And, to an understanding of how society and relationships between people can be translated into relationships between people and nature and nature and people. So that’s the kind of journey I’ve been on until now.
Pihkala: Yeah, well thanks Julian for sharing that and greetings from the northern corner of Europe. I hear that you’ve been around many parts of Europe and I’ve been reading your work via books which have come through Climate Psychology Alliance and once had the privilege of meeting some Scottish Climate Psychology Alliance folks when visiting there. So, we have some connections, but how about you, Kamila? What would you like to share about your journey at this point?
Kamila Kuc: Yeah, thank you for having us. It’s such a great avenue to be having those conversations. I grew up in a small town in Poland, but I spent a lot of my childhood at my grandparent’s farm. My grandparent’s house was right at the edge of the forest, which is now half of its size, unfortunately. Then at the age of 19, I traveled between New York and Paris, and ended up in London. And I nowadays spend half of my time in London trying to get out to go surfing, mainly to Cornwall. I’ve always been interested in the topic of climate change, but I come to the topic from a perspective of an artist, a person that has worked a lot with communities. So typically, my work would take me to smaller places in the world. For example, my last previous film was made in the war-torn zone in Abkhazia, a place between Russian Federation and Georgia, where I worked with local communities about issues that they’re facing largely around war memories. Then, I worked with women at a care home in Morocco, with issues of abuse and poverty. But I’ve really been thinking recently about different methods of working with communities but on a slightly larger scale. So, I was thinking about what the biggest forces in the world right now that are affecting everybody. And of course, you know, climate change is the obvious one. That sort of hyper-object of climate change. I spent some time, about a year, studying it, and my connection with Thomas, learning about Panu’s work and connection with Julian through social dreaming conversations is how I arrived here and formed this perspective.
Doherty: Yeah, that’s really great. Every time we have guests, it’s always interesting to hear their backgrounds. And that’s why I love this idea of environmental identity or just this general open question of how is it that you come to this topic, because it just opens up the door to neat facets of people’s lives. Such as, where they grew up, their travels, and being multicultural or bicultural and the role of the landscape that forms us. That’s under the surface for everyone, but we just don’t think about it. You know, and another thing that’s under the surface is dreaming and our dreams. We know technically that all humans dream every night in some form through our sleep cycles and at different times and places, dreams arise to be part of culture or not. And so, I thought we’d talk about some of your individual projects and then get into these collaborations that are happening. But Julian, I know that you’ve done a lot of different kinds of work with people and you’re one of the leaders in this idea of social dreaming, which is a public outreach modality to get people to work together and think and feel differently about issues and be creative. I thought you could talk just a little bit in general terms about it so we could see how this fits into a lot of the themes that we’re talking about on the podcast.
Manley: Yeah, sure. The thing about social dreaming is that it’s asking people to get together in a group and share their nighttime dreams. So, we’re talking about actual dreams that people have. We’re not talking about dreams or ambitions about the future. And the innovation
in social dreaming is that you’re actually talking to people about dreams, but those dreams don’t belong to you as an individual when you’re talking about them in a group. Those dreams belong to the group as a whole. In other words, they belong to the social sphere. And that’s why we talk about the social unconscious or the associative unconscious when we talk about social dreaming. And it’s important to understand that dreaming is actually just thinking. It’s thinking when you’re asleep. So, one of things I’ve been interested in doing with social dreaming is to understand with other people that there’s nothing strange or unusual about sharing your dreams. Indigenous populations have been doing this for centuries, if not thousands of years. That’s because dreaming is just thinking while you’re asleep. And while you’re asleep, you can think about things in a different way. So, by sharing your dreams, you can share your thoughts about the world that you live in, but you can do it in a different
way to when you’re sharing something in a conscious way of thinking. And when we’re conscious, we try to rationalize things and we miss out on the important emotional aspects of how we relate to people and how we relate to the environment. And I think that’s really essential in lots of complex situations in life. But particularly, since we’re focusing a little bit on the climate emergency and our relationship with nature, it’s really anxiety provoking to imagine what’s happening with the end of the planet, more or less. The apocalypse coming up, the climate emergency.
That anxiety prevents us from taking action and this is what we can see in the world today. Despite the rational knowledge that climate change is caused by human intervention and by the burning of fossil fuels, we seem to find it very, very difficult to move forward. And that’s because we’re not connecting the emotional reality of what that means to the decisions we have to take. The work that we’ve been doing with social dreaming related to climate psychology has demonstrated that through thinking with social dreaming you can come to a clearer, better, more holistic, more complete understanding of the climate emergency. And if you can reach a more complete understanding of the climate emergency, then in theory, you can actually take decisions that make a difference.
Doherty: Yeah, this is beautiful. I have some thoughts that I want to share, but Panu, how is this dovetailing with your understanding of climate emotions in your work and what you see happening in Finland and other places?
Pihkala: Yeah, thanks Julian for introducing us to that. I work a lot with climate emotions and facilitate workshops, but not dream discussions. I know that there’s several psychotherapists in the climate psychology sphere who do that, and I’ve collaborated with some of them, like Sally Gillespie from Australia, who comes more from a Jungian perspective and dreams are very important in her work. She’s been discussing those with workshop members. The way in which some deep emotions and thoughts of ours appear in dreams is very fascinating and years ago there was this book by Michael Otis Hill called Dreaming the End of the World which was fascinating and quite heavy to read because it’s so evocative and the images can be quite powerful. I find this topic very fascinating, but how does that resonate with your work, Kamila? What’s the connection points?
Kuc: Yeah, thank you. I was just thinking about how Julian and I met at some conference outside of London some years ago. And then during COVID, Julian and I held a series of social dreaming matrices with Duke University. Do you remember, Julian? We spent long days and evenings, I think once a week, doing matrices and that was really amazing because in my artistic practice, I’ve always been interested in working with dreams. But this has opened a completely different avenue because, Julian, you used that phrase beautifully with emotional reality and how, when you let that dream go, once it’s in a matrix, it kind of belongs to everybody and it’s a much more, in some ways, neutral way of discussing difficult emotions and difficult ideas. So, for me, the social dreaming has become kind of a, I don’t want to say a tool because I don’t know that that’s the right word, but it’s become a sort of vehicle for me to connect with people and all different communities. So, one of the most important components of the project that we’re currently working on, which all of you are part of, is social dreaming matrices, which hopefully Julian will be able to deliver many of them.
But the idea, as Julian mentioned, is how you connect people and more importantly, how you connect people who might have very disparate ideas about the same topic. But I think that emotional reality is really important because particularly with the climate crisis, we know the facts, we know the numbers, but there is also that idea of yours, Thomas, of climate hostages. Like what Julian said, that anxiety that we have is so paralyzing that we end up with this kind of wide-mouthed apocalypse narratives and meanwhile nobody is doing anything. So, I think my response to that through my artistic practice is to create collaborations, artistic alliances, but also create groups of people where we can think through those ideas through creative practices.
Doherty: Yeah, it’s fascinating. So, listeners, you can think about this. The meta message with a lot of our conversations is that solutions, ideas, and creativity are happening in real time with real people that are meeting each other at conferences and working together. Panu and I work together on this podcast and Kamila and Julian are working on things. A lot of its about active collaboration. The idea of a social dreaming group is called a matrix or matrice and a matrix is sort of a mold or an environment where things grow out of. So, this is the kind of matrice of all our work. I’m talking about listeners and everyone. We’re all working together in some form with people. One equalizing factor for humans, for better and worse, is that we all have dreams, in terms of visions and goals, but we also all have dreams. All humans dream, no matter what your political party is. I think a lot of people are closet dream lovers and don’t necessarily know how to talk about it.
I remember when I worked with young people doing outdoor wilderness therapy years ago, one of my most favorite parts of these three-week long expeditions in the forest or in the desert is that every morning we would have a dream circle with the young people. And I was, as a therapist, using it very strategically to check in on the kids and see how they were doing. But you learn so much from people when they talk about their dreams, because of course we were thinking differently, and certain parts of our brain are on and certain parts of our brain are off. It was a little bit of social dreaming, in another form, because we would share our dreams together. But it was therapy so we were always focused on interpreting and putting it inside the person, as traditional Freudian dream interpretation would be. But this is different, right? With social dreaming, we are using our dreams to connect in real time. So, it’s not about some sort of mystical collected unconscious that exists in another reality. It’s literally our collective unconscious that’s manifesting right here in the day. Right Julian? That’s part of it?
Manley: Yeah, that’s right. And I think the advantage of social dreaming is that it actually is not therapy. It’s very important to understand that it isn’t therapy. We’re thinking together with the thoughts that we had in our nighttime thinking. And as soon as we understand that, sharing your dreams doesn’t become something unusual, it becomes something natural. And if you ever do social dreaming, you’d be quite surprised how natural it feels. Maybe the first five minutes feel a bit odd and a bit strange because you come in with your prejudices about dreams. You kind of think, my dream is my intimate private thing so I’m not going to share it with others. But actually, five minutes into a social dreaming matrix, people just flow with their dreams. And it just demonstrates how natural the entire process is.
But I also want to say something else, Thomas. And that is that it’s not just about actual dreams, it’s about dream thinking. In other words, there might be some people in a matrix who don’t often dream or who never dream. That doesn’t mean they’re excluded from sharing the dream time with people, because we’re talking about a state of reverie, a dream state. This is a little bit like daydreaming, so people can get involved in the images from other people’s dreams and they can associate to those dreams with images that float into their minds even if they don’t actually have dreams themselves. And so, nobody’s left out. It’s a very inclusive, democratic space where everybody, no matter how much or how little they dream, can become involved.
So, that’s a really important aspect of dreams and I say that because I myself don’t dream very much as a matter of fact. People kind of expect that I’m a dreamer and I dream ten times a night. It’s actually not the case. I dream very little, but I never feel excluded, and I’ve never met anyone who said to me that’s terrible or that’s not for me because I just don’t dream and therefore, I wasn’t involved. That’s not the case at all because we can all daydream. And what is that? What is daydreaming? It’s creativity and that’s where the link comes into art and filmmaking. It’s creativity in the imagination producing visual images and that’s not so far removed from filmmaking.
Kuc: Yeah Julian, do remember one of the matrices? Maybe you can talk a little bit about what happens post matrix. That sort of meaning making session. Do remember one of the matrices during COVID when one of the recurring symbols in everybody’s dream was an octopus? Do remember that? Because that for me was one of the most powerful matrices. Could you say a little bit more about that meaning making session that happens after the matrix?
Manley: Yeah, sure. Well, there’s always one image that seems to capture people’s imagination and Kamila is referring to this particular image of the octopus that came up in a series of social dream matrices. And the point about that kind of image is that within the image, there’s all sorts of potential interpretations. And each person in the matrix can have their own interpretation of what that particular image might mean. So, there’s no conflict in the interpretation of the image because all interpretations are held within the single image. Within the image of the octopus, you can have all sorts of ideas like talking about the tentacles, the eight possibilities, the intelligence of the octopus, which tells us something about our relationship with the non-human, and so on and so forth. However, even though Kamila’s put me on the spot and asked me to interpret the image of the octopus,
I also want to say that the experience of social dreaming is an embodied experience. In other words, when you’re in the matrix, you feel the affective power of the dreams and what’s happening in the matrix. It’s actually much more difficult to describe it when you’re out of the embodied experience. Nevertheless, as part of social dreaming, you have a social dreaming matrix for say about 60 minutes. And after that, you have a meaning making session because it’s important to understand that during the actual social dreaming matrix itself, we don’t interpret dreams. We don’t judge people for their dreams. There’s no sense of any conscious, explicit meaning making in the matrix itself, because all the images are allowed to float and people make their own connections in their own minds as they wish. But after the matrix, there’s a post-matrix discussion where we get out of the dream mode, and we get more into the standard mode of thinking. And we do that to give people a chance to digest and process the different dreams and feelings in the matrix. I say dreams and feelings because in the images, what you have are often deep emotions, so you need time after the matrix to process those emotions. That’s kind of ethically correct as well as important to help people understand how to make some kind of sense of what’s been going on in the matrix previously. So, the post-Matrix discussion may last about 30 minutes or 45 minutes.
Doherty: Yeah, this is really great. It’s a state of mind so we’re working with and cultivating a state of mind, a state of being. I think that’s a mini rite of passage where you go into this more reverie state. Kamila, you’re an artist and you’re envisioning doing a fairly ambitious program that’s integrating Panu’s work on environmental emotion and my work on environmental identity. It’s the same with environmental identity. After a few minutes of talking about it, you can’t stop people from talking about it because everyone has an environmental identity, and they like to talk about it. Just like I think they like to talk about their dreams. And you’re a filmmaker. You’ve done interesting documentary style, artistic work and activism. What’s your vision? Now this is your dream, I guess more in the real world. But what’s your vision for some of this project for other listeners to get inspired by.
Kuc: Yeah, thank you. I guess the project you’re referring to is a project I’ve been discussing with both you and Julian for quite some time now. It’s tentatively called Hyperobjects and Climate Hostages. This is a working title as we are applying for funds, but really the idea is to engage a group of diverse participants in four different locations in the world in conversations about climate crisis and try and see what conversations we can have through artistic practices within the topic of climate crisis. So currently the project is based in Seattle, Detroit, London, and Coventry. I know there have been some noises that Poland is quite interested. I’m hoping we might go to Finland at some point potentially. There are definitely opportunities there, but I guess the idea is that we’ll engage in a series of ecological identity map workshops, which is potentially where you and Panu can come in as well as conversations obviously about climate crisis, but also creative arts workshops. So, filmmaking, poetry, performance art, and social dreaming matrices.
And out of that will come a feature film that’s multi-authored and has diverse perspective in it. In different parts of the world, we’re working with different people. So, in London, I’m hoping to collaborate with elderly and neurodiverse populations. In Detroit, we’re currently working with Yemeni and African American populations. And in Seattle, indigenous populations. So, we’re really trying to debunk a lot of those white man saviorism and apocalyptic narratives about a climate crisis and see what we can do and what we can learn about the climate crisis through creative practices.
Thomas, you mentioned my recent training. I’m currently training at Seattle University as a social justice and multicultural counselor. I’m interested in all the social justice issues that do come up for a lot of different communities. So, I guess, there’s a couple of things that I just want to finish with that needless to say, we don’t see climate crisis as just an environmental issue. It’s a social justice issue. And it is also, as I see it, a crisis of representation. What is the image of climate crisis? How do we represent it? Here’s me as an artist interested in innovating with methods of working with different communities and different participants. How do we need to adapt? So, we have project leads in every location and are in dialogue with people from the community, so we don’t impose any frameworks on any community. So, everything is a dialogue and negotiation to really try and create a space for all those different perspectives to come out and social dreaming is obviously crucial part of it.
Doherty: It’s amazing. Let me ask you a very quick question. So, this seems to be taking your work to another scale or another level. So, listeners out there who are inspired but feel like they would never have the guts to take on something like this. What helps you to do it? What have you learned practically that you think helps you to take on something like this? I know it’s a big question, but does anything come to your mind?
Kuc: No, thank you for that question because I was trying to figure out how to squeeze everything in. But I think, like I said, for me, the answer to everything is really group work and its collaborations. And if I may, I would like to give a shout-out to few people and organizations that have been so responsive to the project from the very beginning. Obviously, all of you are here, which I’m very grateful for you being part of the project. But in Seattle, we’re working with Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Rana San, Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, and Seattle University, who is also one of the funders of the project. These are people originally who I’ve gotten in touch with, and they came on board quickly. In Detroit, I want to give a shout-out an amazing organization, Augusta Morrison at Sidewalk, Bulk Space, Jessica Ali, but also Mothlight Artist Collective, who will be delivering a lot of 60-millimeter workshops. Also, Julia Yezbick and Shanna Maurizi. In London, Laura Fischer and Traumascapes, an organization that is funded by Laura, who is a counselor, but they work primarily in the context of trauma, but are just starting to work with climate change related trauma. So really, it’s the openness and kindness of people because we have psychologists on board, we have artists, we have activists. The poet CA Conrad has just come on board. We also have musicians coming.
At the moment, I think I have about 20 partners and something like 30 different people. So yeah, it is definitely a beast to manage, I couldn’t have done it without the openness of the collaborators. So far from everybody I approached, I haven’t had a single person who said no. There were a couple of maybes and couple of tentative yeses that we are waiting on, but nobody said no, which is to me amazing.
Manley: And Kamila...
Kuc: Yeah, sorry, can I just mention one more thing? I want to also give a shout-out to two more people. Katherin Hervey and Katie Sedgwick, two LA based producers who have just started On the Border, a production company in LA. They are championing a lot of work that’s done in the field of restorative justice. So, Katherin Hervey did a lot of work with prisons in America. We just have such an amazing team of people. I think this can go in so many different interesting directions. Yeah, sorry Julian.
Manley: Yeah, you forgot that one of the actors is nature and the environment. And this is one of the important things that I’ve been learning in my work with social dreaming and indigenous knowledge and indigenous populations. The idea that nature can be given personhood. Nature can be a person and we can have a relationship with nature which is not a done to but done with relationship. I think this is one of the ways that dreams work to enable us to create something possible out of what apparently in our cognitive minds is impossible. So, you know, I’ve been very interested, for example, in the idea in New Zealand that the Whanganui River could have legal, personhood status. And that comes directly from the indigenous thinking of the Māori’s who say, “I am the river and the river is me.” And they don’t mean that as a bit of poetry. They mean that literally. And the only way we can reach that kind of literal truth is through our emotional and dream engagement with nature. So, nature becomes an actor. I really hope that we can introduce nature as an actor in the work as well.
Kuc: Completely, I think that’s a really, really great point. I think that’s why I think collaborating with different people in these diverse communities will bring us so many different points of view. So yeah, I think just being open to that and seeing what manifests. Amazing, thank you for that, Julian.
Doherty: Yeah, this is fascinating and we’re going to put some links in our show notes to some of these projects if you want to learn more or get involved. Yeah, it’s real time. All this stuff is developing in real time, in real places, in real contexts. Panu, we have to wrap up for our conversation today, but I can’t imagine that this doesn’t resonate with many things you’re seeing in your work. Do you have any thoughts to tie this up around climate emotions, coping and how this is landing for you?
Pihkala: Yeah, it’s been fascinating to listen to all that you have been sharing. For contemporary people, the big challenge is to engage with all the complexities and difficulties of the state of the world. And sometimes, creative methods can be highly helpful in that. Listening to what is under the surface, which is a category also for dreams. That’s why I think that the work that you are doing is highly important and I hope that people, including you dear listeners, find ways for that creative engagement, hopefully together with trusted others.
Doherty: Yeah. Well, thank you, Kamila, Julian, and Panu. We’re having this real-time international conversation from the US, Finland, the UK, Scotland, and London. Listeners out there, we’re waiting for our end of the year report, but I know in the past we’ve had listeners from at least 50 countries. This small podcast goes out around the world, so it’s our own little dreaming as well. So, listeners, be well, and Panu and Kamila and Julian, you all have a good evening. Take care.
Kuc: Thank you so much.
Manley: Thank you.
Pihkala: Take care.
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