Biblical, Medieval & Renaissance Dreams

Literary Dreams: 19th & 20th Century

Dreams, Media & Performance

Dreams, Culture & Religion

Nightmares: Paranoia, Psychedelia, Trauma

The Dreaming Mind

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. –Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

You must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. –William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

Can dreams help us understand the self, as Freud argues? Or does sleep blot out the self entirely, as Faulkner suggests? Are dreams mystical missives? Meaningless by-products of firing neurons? Do they consolidate memory? Drive artistic endeavors? The elusiveness of dreams, which propel us to imagined worlds whose logic falters when we wake, has made them an inspiration to innumerable artists and an object of study for neurobiologists, psychologists, and philosophers. Students in the 2006-07 English Honors Seminar at Queens College (of The City University of New York) have spent two semesters exploring dreams and dreaming from a variety of perspectives, including those of visual artists, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. In these pages, we share some of the results of our investigations.

Our projects represent diverse approaches to studying the art and science of dreaming. In them, you will find discussions of some classic dream theories, such as those by Aristotle, Freud, and Jung; more recent theories by J. Allan Hobson, Ernest Hartmann, and Stephen La Berge; literary texts by writers such as Sir Thomas Malory, William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Anais Nin, Franz Kafka, and Kazuo Ishiguro; and films by Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick. You'll find the critical explorations of the role of dreaming in religious and cultural traditions, including Biblical scholarship, Native American spiritual ceremonies, and Japanese anime; special categories of dreaming, like children's dreams, nightmares, or lucid dreams; and some surprising mental phenomena, including the incubation of artistic and scientific ideas during sleep, the role dreams may play in memory and learning, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.