A reprise of last fall’s dream seminar with some new twists, this workshop is an experiment in dream negotiation, or you might say, dream socialization. Dreams are radically private and intimate experiences. Nevertheless – or perhaps as a result – cultures around the world and through time have found different ways of making them explicable and public. In our culture, psychoanalysis is perhaps the most familiar strategy for making the private world of dreaming relatable to others. It is, however, far from the only one, and even not especially representative of the ways dreams have been shared in various cultures.

The goal of this workshop is lead participants through a series of exercises in which we try to find a common, useful vocabulary for describing and comparing each other’s dreams. We will try to pinpoint what exactly makes them similar and what makes them different, and what standards of comparison might be required to make such determinations. Above all, we will try to see if our dreams can be made to communicate with one another, in the same sense that the products of the waking mind – poems, paintings, ideas, melodies – are said to enter into dialogue with one another.

For more information, please write Matthew Spellberg.