Drift Spaces

And why we need them more than ever

Drift Spaces are the purest form of ‘time off’. They are quite literally when time has stopped and we find ourselves in the aimless drift of our thoughts, sensations, memories and associations.

It happens when I’m sitting by my daughter’s cot in the half-light of early evening, waiting for her to fall asleep. With nothing to do, no phone or pen or radio or input, I’m simply there. Thoughts and ideas ebb and flow, my body softens, the sound of the city from somewhere outside.

In psychoanalytic theory, a Drift Space is known as ‘Reverie’. Reverie is an essential part of infant development, and I would argue, our continued wellbeing. Bion (1962) described a mother’s capacity for ‘Maternal Reverie’ as central to the development of her baby’s ‘thought-thinking apparatus’. In short, a baby is overwhelmed by the intensity of stimulation and feelings moving through its body, and a mother’s ability to be present, soak up this energy like a sponge and desaturate it, returns the experience of being alive to the baby in a more manageable form. Over time this energetic dance turns into a kind of dawning clarity for the infant, and embodies the very beginnings of mental maturation.

Reverie in a broader sense happens in certain circumstances: a child held safely by an emotionally present caregiver, a therapist willing to sit with you in silence, or the liminal space as we find our way towards sleep. Somehow the conscious mind has withdrawn, and something else is present. The hallmark of Drift Spaces is that they’re ordinary. You could be washing up, or drawing or driving, or waiting for your kid to sleep. It’s when we feel safe enough to let go of there being anywhere to get to and and time loses meaning; all the noise we’ve picked up during the week suddenly has the chance to settle and clear. A precious state, easily disturbed, retreating like a wild creature the moment we move too quickly. But such is life, and as soon as we try to control a Drift State, it naturally falls away. The point isn’t to try and hold on to the expansiveness, but to let it come, and respond to opportunities for this kind of restful, healing state, known as ‘The Long Tide’ by Cranio-Sacral practitioners. The best thing is, there’s nothing you need to ‘do’ to get there, no activity to book in, no habit to try and create…just the felt reminder of my words and the invitation that lives within every Drift Space, which is simply to let go.

Samantha Harvey has written an exquisite book on insomnia (The Shapeless Unease), exploring the longing for the landscape of sleep, a drift space all of its own:

As the night struggles on one hour after another and I’m awake to see them all, awake and exhausted, I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. Something bigger and stranger than yourself takes hold. Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out. The priests and the scientists are made equal. They are made equal with the wild boar and the bat. There’s nothing for you to assign your faith to but this one inevitable act of animal grace that is yours for the taking. All the scientists in the world are looking for the beautiful order and logic that opens up in that silken path towards sleep. All the religions in the world were invented to express that mercy and grace that comes in the moments before we close our eyes, and go under.

I care deeply about the importance of Drift Spaces for mental health. I’ve needed them personally in the context of my husband’s cancer treatment, recovery phase, and our subsequent IVF and parenthood, and in the last few years of my practice I’ve observed the benefit of them for clients. I started developing a creative way to access this particular state of being in my Earth Matrix group last year - combining a monthly Chi Kung Class in the evening, with a Social Dreaming Matrix the next morning. The feedback I received for this new combination spoke for itself:

Chi Kung allowed me to bring stuck emotions, sensations or thought processes into motion, which then moved to the surface and somehow expressed themselves through my own dreams and the reflections of the dreams shared by others.

With dreamwork, the revelation didn't just come through me talking about my own dreams, it was the weaving and coming together of others' dreams and stories that surfaced the bigger depths of the reality I was experiencing - which in turn allowed me to realise the sheer futility of my attachment to my past.  I think I experienced one of the biggest shifts within a dreamwork session and I feel the reverberations of this shift to this very day.

We NEED this stuff. Ways to listen from a deeper place. And this is how it all began. My model of Dreamweaving just seemed to appear through me, bubbling up from the great unknown and offering the possibility of bringing the two different sides of my professional identity together - the energetics of BodyMind Maturation with the relational dynamics of Group Therapy. I had been practicing and teaching Chi Kung for a while, and my interest in Dreamwork was growing, so I put the two together.

Chi Kung Class in the evening cuts through the doing. It’s a practice expressly designed to plug us into the present moment; the gentle, repeating forms calm the nervous system, like a walk in the woods, and its centre led movement brings us back to our inner world. We go to bed, with some loosening of the rational mind set in motion, and meet the following morning for a Social Dreaming Matrix, fresh from the land of sleep. Social Dreaming was ‘discovered’ by Gordon Lawrence in 1982, when he was working as a social scientist and researcher at the Tavistock. It’s a beautiful method of speaking dreams in a group without analysis or judgement. In my particular style of Matrix held online, Dreamwork begins by turning cameras off and connecting through the expansiveness of audio alone. The group voice their dreams, whether that be a coherent ‘story’ or tiny fragments. Associations to these dreams, and dreams from the past, are also welcome. For the second part of the session we turn cameras back on, to reflect together on what is being unconcealed. Hearing yourself speak your dreams, and others theirs…it’s a trip and a release and a comforting reminder of the universality of human experience. The less we know, the more we understand.

If this calls to you, come join the next session. You can book your place here.