Writing Dreams

Undergraduate / Graduate

In this course students will study poetry, literature, and art written with dreams and dream practices to better understand the relation between dreaming and writing; and to gain some creative practice in connecting their own writing to their dreaming. We will read literature from a broad range of cultural and historical locales to gain an expanded sense of oneiric writing. And we will intensify that reading with regular writing exercises meant to elicit poetics from the subconscious. In doing so we will trouble simplistic accounts of the subconscious as merely suppressed or hidden consciousness, considering instead how the psychology of nightly visions relates to social, political, historical, and anthropological worlds. Students will be expected to maintain daily/nightly writing journals with weekly prompts to facilitate creative works. Final projects will consist of a polished portfolio or some equivalent. (Poetry, Theory)