Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. ~E.M. Cioran, The Tempation to Exist

What is the difference between the dreaming mind and the waking mind? Is there a fundamental difference? What's happen, physiologically, in the brain of a dreamer? Are all dreams wish fulfillment, as Sigmund Freud declares? Or are they the byproduct of firing neurons, as J. Allan Hobson suggests? Do dreams allow the unconscious mind to act as form of psychological balance for the waking mind, as Carl Jung theorizes? Bert O. States associates dreams with a “cognitive fire” that may ignite the mind into writing. Stephen LaBerge claims that when dreams can be lucid, the dreamer becomes “empowered by the knowledge that the world they are experiencing is a creation of their own imagination.” The projects in this section attempt to illuminate just what is meant by the dreaming mind. Some discuss the way literal and metaphorical dreams are represented in literature—or example, Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love, Jane-a-dreams, Dreaming of Eyre, and Children's Literature and Dreaming, among others), while others explore the sometimes eccentric nature of dreams as displayed through the lens of various dream theories—for example, Dreaming, Myth & Archetype, Sleep Still: Terror and Sleep Paralysis, Psychedelic Dreams.