FYSP 053 - Dreams

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
We spend, on average, a third of our lives asleep; yet most of us consider our waking life to be more important and more real than our dream life. In this course, we will explore cultural dimensions of the act of dreaming, by examining its representations in literature, film, visual art, psychology, religious studies, philosophy, and politics. From Sigmund Freud, who understood dreams to be a manifestation of our repressed desires, to the 12^th-century Islamic scholar Ibn ‘Arabi, who saw dreams as a liminal realm between life and the hereafter, to the jazz musician Sun Ra, who dreamed of a Black utopia in outer space, we will explore how dreams have historically been used to question the foundations of our knowledge, and to imagine alternate realities.