The Social Life of Dreaming: How People Dream Around the World
Susan Lepselter
American Studies
Dreaming is at once a universal, biological human experience and a profound example of cross-cultural variation. This class studies philosophies and theories of dreaming around the world, from Freud to shamanism. We explore what people in different cultures dream about, how they narrate and interpret their dreams, the interplay between dreams and art, and the entanglement between supernatural belief and phenomena such as the Nightmare. The variety of dream experience — and how people use their dreams in art and culture — reveals deep interconnections between culture, psychology and the human capacity to make meaning of symbols.
In this class, students will:
- Gain a greater understanding of the complexity of human experience around the world, in both its universality and diversity, by learning about how people dream, narrate dreams, and interpret dreams around the world
- Learn to understand how symbols work in different cultural contexts
- Interpret varieties of emotional and aesthetic expression through the rich variety of global dream narrative conventions
- Analyze texts from world folklore, mythology and fiction that have been inspired by the culture of dreaming
- Create a significant work of art inspired by their own dreaming experiences
- Critically analyze scholarship of dreaming from both Western and non-Western perspectives, including philosophical, religious, psychoanalytic and mythical approaches to the dream
- Keep a dream journal
- Contribute to a collective dream database
Catalog Information: HON-H 240 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY