Courses

This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is an interdisciplinary investigation of how dreams are viewed and understood across a range of the historical, sociocultural, political, and scholarly environments in which they are experienced and interpreted.  Eclectic in approach, we will focus on close readings of a selection of dream texts, beginning with Freud’s “The Dream of Irma’s Injection.” We will aim to open out the text over several weeks. To facilitate this process, the syllabus will include an array of suggested readings linked to each week’s focus of inquiry. Students are expected to make a selection from these readings (or other readings that you find relevant) in order to prepare your own close reading of the dream text to discuss in class.

We will then turn to other dreamers who draw on different aspects of the Islamic tradition to understand their own dreams, with supplementary readings drawn form history, anthropology, and religious studies to provide  contexts for interpreting these dreams.