In the dead of night, it is not uncommon for the most ordinary individuals to fly, revisit childhood haunts, or explore underwater cities. In antiquity, dreams were typically understood as forms of divination or prophetic visions giving the dreamer access to an ordinarily invisible realm of spirits and deities. In modernity, dreams have been seen as psychological phenomena, internal to the mind of the dreamer, revelations of the mysteries of human experience and thought—the key, not to other worlds, but to the complicated inner world of hope, memory, desire, fantasy, and fear. This course will afford the opportunity to study how dreams have been understood and represented in modern works of philosophy, gothic novels, tales of the supernatural, autobiography, and psychology. Authors whose work we'll read include Descartes, Rousseau, Hoffman, Coleridge, Keats, Brontë, Poe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Freud. We will supplement our primary readings with forays into contemporary research on dreams in order to think about how the arts and the sciences define and approach the same subject matter.
About Professor Yousef