What It Means to Dream

Catalog description

What is the significance of dreams? Do they symbolically express hidden desires, or do they make us question who we are? Do they re-frame our past such that our diverse experiences unexpectedly blend together, or is their significance paradoxically that they are unimportant and forgotten, yet unavoidable? This course will attempt to answer these questions via writers such as Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Leiris, and Carroll, as well as thinkers such as Freud, Aristotle, Descartes, Bergson, and Blanchot. We will see that dreams cannot be taken for granted; even from scientific perspectives on sleep, we must dream in order to live. We will also consider how unconscious thoughts may be expressed by surrealist painting, automatic writing, photography, and film. In fact, well see that cinematic images arguably influence and are influenced by our capacity to dream: like dreams, such images do not actually exist in the world. Students will consult the dream journals of great writers and attempt to recall their own dreams in order to consider how literary depictions and cinematic assertions of dreams affect our impressionistic visual imaginations. Students will also work in groups and consult philosophy, art history, literary criticism, and science to determine what it means to dream.