NEH Enduring Questions Course on the Nature of Dreams

FAIN: AQ-50479-11

York County Community College (Wells, ME 04090-5341)
Seth N. Rogoff (Project Director: September 2010 to April 2016)

The development of an undergraduate seminar on the nature of dreams.

The proposed course will focus on the enduring question: what is a dream? Throughout history and in diverse cultures, the analysis of dreams has provoked foundational, pre-disciplinary questions about knowledge, science, selfhood, society, morality and divinity. Students will investigate the subject of dreams within the following four units: dreams and the divine, dreams and knowledge, dreams and selfhood, and dreams and society. Students will read, among other works, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method, Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, and J. Allan Hobson's Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. A public film series and trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will enable students to probe the treatment of dreams in other media.