Dreams Interpreted, Live! and The Bloggies
Dreams Interpreted While You Wait!
Movie Stars, Drugs, and Other Dirty Stuff!
and our own little award show The Bloggies!
These are some of my great ideas for the conference. But, of course, I need your involvement to make them fly. I want you all to look this over and comment what you think. Maybe it needs to be shortened more. (I have it running, ideally, at three hours.) Maybe I should have used different papers for the panels. I tried to do what I thought was best.
Aside from the greeting and the closing remarks, there are four sections to this exhibit. I have tried to establish them thematically. Each includes a panel of student work and a roundtable and should run (if all goes as planned) at 45 minutes each. I made careful use of transitions here as well. In between the panel and the roundtable there will be a song played with dreams in the lyrics. At the end of each section we'll be playing a film clip that involves dreams and/or surrealism.
I shortened the panels to just two people per panel. I thought this would make for interesting juxtapositioning interpretations. There are four panels in total, allowing eight students to present their theories for five minutes at a time, followed by a brief five minute question-and-answer session with the panel.
I've thought of most of the ideas for the roundtables myself. (I apologize for being so brash in doing so, but I felt they were awesome ideas.)
--One is (based of Professor Tougaw's idea about Sigmund Freud) called Father Freud. Here we'll discuss Freud's importance as a psychoanalysist, the validity of his theories, and whether he has any place in today's society.
--The next one is called Movie Star Cameos. Here we'll discuss the invasion of our dreams by movie stars, cartoon characters, and video games (etc.), how that happens, and what that tells us about our culture.
--The next is called Dreams Interpreted While You Wait. Here is where I want to get out of discussion and into some real action. I want to take some dreams (three) off of the blogs (with permission of the individual dreamers, of course) and have various people interpret them from different lenses. We can do any combination of lucid dreaming, Hartmann, Jung, Hobson, Richardson, and of course Freud.
--The last roundtable event is called The Bloggies. This is our own little awards show at the end of the conference to showcase and reward the work we did on the blogs. We can make up and vote on catagories like "Most Prolific", "Funniest Moment", "Freud-Boy", "Most Obscure Reference", "The Oddball", and anything else we can think of. (I'm very open as to what catagories are established.) We will need to form some sort of voting system for this. (Possibly email.) I imagine the award process to involve little statuettes and an excerpt read from the winning entry.
--These roundtables should be short and sweet. I imagined them running about 30 minutes each (possibly including the Q-and-A session)-- with the only possible exception being The Bloggies, because that will depend on us. (Plus it will also end with the giving of the Greenberg Prize for outstanding work in the English Honors Program).
That's the long end of it. What follows is a bare-bones script of how the evening will play out. A diagram so you can visualize all those ideas I just said. (Please excuse any typos that may have occured in my feverish endeavor to pump this out.) Also, before we get to that, I'd just like to repeat my desire to emcee this shindig (and, therefore, chairing all the roundtables). I think I have a good talent for these things, as my classmates will attest to, both in charisma and being able to referee a discussion.
Dream Seminar Conference
A coming together of high literature and low humor-- of classic arts and pop cultures-- of current students and future scholars.
0 - Welcome
Un Chien Andelou is showing as the audience shuffles in.
Professor Tougaw introduces the class and the emcee for the evening.
The Emcee outlines the evening's (or, rather, afternoon's) entertainment -- the events of the conference.
Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover" plays
I - The Mind
Panel (15 min)
Robert Wargas- "Representing the Unconscious in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining"
Alexandra Elbaum- "Orienting Freud in Franz Kafka's Dreamworld"
question-and-answer
Bob Dylan's "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" plays
Roundtable (30 min) Father Freud
Thomas Edison's "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" is shown
II - Patterns in Pop Culture
Panel (15 min)
Melissa Chen- "Dreams in Anime: A Glimpse into the Nature of the Japanese Culture"
Maria Hartofilis- "Dream Reel: A Study of Freudian Influence on the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman"
question-and-answer
The Everly Brothers' "All I Have to do is Dream" plays
Roundtable (30 min) Moviestar Cameos
a clip from Brunel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois" is shown
III - Practical Dreaming
Panel (15 min)
Kim Bain- "Dreams as Reality"
Rebekah Rose- "Sleep on It!"
question-and-answer
Roy Orbison's "Sweet Dreams Baby" plays
Roundtable (30 min) Dreams Interpreted While You Wait
Monty Python's sketch "Philosopher Soccer" is shown
IV - The Imfamy of Sleep
Panel (15 min)
Asif Badar- "Character and Audience, Reality and Illusion in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Megan Moriarty- "Psychadelic Dreams"
question-and-answer
The Postal Service's "Sleeping In" plays
The Bloggies
including the Greenberg Prize
Closing
The Emcee thanks all those people who deserve thanks, plugs the website, and reminds all those loyal souls that there's a reception to follow.
Un Chien Andelou is shown, again
(FIN)
That's my plan. I think it will involve all of us, and in more ways than anything else I've heard so far. I'm anxious to hear what you all think.