For a lot of people, one great thing about living in the Dream House will be the chance to experiment with living more independently, away from their parents for a while, and to learn take-care-of-yourself skills like cooking, gardening, cleaning, stuff like that. We hope to provide a balance between, on the one hand, adult guidance, coaching, and help, and on the other hand plenty of opportunity for dreamers to experience autonomy, freedom, and the chance to make their own experiments and mistakes. Our houseparent(s) will show people the ropes—how to keep the house clean, how to cook (or how to cook better, for people who already know how), even how to do laundry for folks who are new to that, etc.. And over the ten week period, everyone will have plenty of opportunity to experiment, have fun, and learn about all this stuff—both in formal workshops and informally, through day-to-day practice.

This is, in fact, a good place to talk about chores. Each person will spend about an average of an hour per day helping to keep the house running smoothly. They’ll cooperate together to:

Agreements

In our first few days together, we'll all talk about our needs and wishes and make agreements for how to live together--things like how clean to keep the house, noise levels at different times of day in different places, etc. Our first priority is to make sure that our space is tidy enough for everyone to feel comfortable and clearheaded and peaceful and able to concentrate, and that everyone is getting enough quiet and peace to get a good sleep in. But, we'll talk about these things together so that we don't end up with arbitrary rules like "lights out at 10:00 p.m." if no one wants to go to bed before 11:00 anyway.

For more on agreements, as well as house rules, click here. 

conflict resolution and decision making

Our goal is a household full of forgiveness, affection, cooperation, and win-win solutions. We don't want anyone storming around silently creating a deep freeze for others, any physical violence whatsoever, or violent verbal outbursts except in the context of intentional clearing--generally with the guidance of a houseparent or our conflict and communication coach. When 2 parties are in serious conflict, if they're willing we'll often spend time during our house meetings coaching them to work through their conflict with other members present. Our experience is that this can benefit a group by lessening secrecy and gossip, building trust and closeness, and helping everyone learn about dealing with conflict; and that it can benefit the conflicting individuals by offering them additional support and perspective. Of course, smaller conflicts will hopefully be handled on the spur of the moment—on your own, or perhaps with the help of other members or houseparents.

We’ll also experiment with different decision-making processes, drawing on consensus training techniques, the book Democracy in Small Groups, etc.