Social dreaming was originally developed by Gordon Lawrence as a means of consulting to organisations. It can shed light on participant’s experience in all kinds of temporary learning institutions and can be helpful and integrating in terms of conference events. It is an experiential event in which we offer dreams and free associate to them to work towards a collective sense of themes arising from them.

The space for coming together to share and explore our dreams through an associative process is known as the dream matrix. A "host" provides support to the matrix usually in a snowflake pattern of seating that is neither individual or group focused, guiding our journey in sharing and making sense of our dreams by offering connections between them and hypotheses that illuminate their contributions. The word "host" is used to introduce the idea that the matrix is not a group to be facilitated or led but an open space for containing and working with dreams.

The time is spent in two phases, an initial event in which participants share dreams and associations and a reflection event in which participants do sense making of the material that arose during the matrix. The total time of the event is 1.5hrs.