A growing list of resources to further explore the themes that shaped The Dreamshare Seer ; dreams, AI, community, art, Malaysian indigenous dreamwork, sleep, psychoanalysis, etc
Relevant books, articles, websites, films, music, artists, etc
We’re gradually adding information to this section!
If you have any recommendations, we’d love to hear them: Please contact us.
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Dreams: overview:
The Psychology of Dreaming – The Psychology of Everything, Josie Malinowski, Routledge (2020)
There are 2 peer-reviewed academic journals which focus on dreams:
Dreaming is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/drm
International Journal of Dream Research (Heidelberg University)
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/index
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Sleep, Neuroscience of Dreaming:
Matthew Walker Why We Sleep, (2017), Penguin
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary. (2013), Verso
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Psychoanalysis and Depth Psychology and Dreams:
Jung, C. G. (1934). The practical use of dream analysis. In C. G. Jung (Ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Dreams (pp. 87-108). London, UK: Routledge.
Jung, C. G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future). New York, NY: American Library.
Freud, S. (1900). “The interpretation of dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 4, 5, ed J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press).
Freud, S. (1916). “Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15, ed J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press).
Greenberg, R., and Pearlman, C. A. (1999). The interpretation of dreams: a classic revisited. Psychoanal. Dialogues 9, 749–765. doi: 10.1080/10481889909539359
Giegerich, W. (2021). Working With Dreams. Initiation into the Soul’s Speaking About Itself, Routledge
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Art and Psychoanalysis:
Maria Walsh Art and Psychoanalysis, (2021), Bloomsbury Visual Arts
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Art and Dreams
Relevant art movements; Surrealism and Symbolism and dreams.
Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism,. (1972) Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press
Surrealism and the Dream ( 2014), Dawn Ades (Author), José Jiménez (Editor), Georges Sebbag (Contributor), Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza
Painting the Dream. A History of Dreams in Art, from the Renaissance to Surrealism, (2020),
Daniel Bergez, Abbeville Press.
Oneirology and art.
Mark Blagrove, Julia Lockheart, The Science and Art of Dreaming( 2023) , Routledge
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AI, Dream databases + dreams and machine learning;
Database Of Dreams, The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity – Rebecca Lemov (2014)
Yale University Press
‘An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a “lost” project to unlock humanity’s common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data’
Kelly Bulkeley’s Sleep and Dream Database https://sleepanddreamdatabase.org/
Schneider and Domhoff’s Dreambank, https://www.dreambank.net/
The overfitted brain hypothesis, Luke Y. Prince and Blake A. Richards, (2021) Patterns (N Y). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8134936/
Hoel’s theory is that dreaming is an exaptation, a trait that evolved for one purpose but later takes on others.
What is the purpose of dreaming? Many scientists have postulated a role for dreaming in learning, often with the aim of improving generative models. In this issue of Patterns, Erik Hoel proposes a novel hypothesis, namely, that dreaming provides a means to reduce overfitting. This hypothesis is interesting both for neuroscience and for the development of new machine-learning systems.The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming: The Where, How, When, What, and Why of Dreams by G William Domhoff | 4 Oct 2022
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.192080
https://archivedream.wordpress.com/about/
Bulkeley, K. (2016) Big dreams: the science of dreaming and the origins of religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hillman, J. (1979) The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper and Row.
Jandial, R. (2024) This is why you dream: what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. London: Cornerstone.
King, P., Bulkeley, K. and Welt, B. (2011) Dreaming in the classroom: practices, methods, and resources in dream education. Albany: SUNY Press.
Kingsland, J. (2019) Am I dreaming? The science of altered states, from psychedelics to virtual reality and beyond. London: Atlantic Books.
Lawrence, G. (2010) The creativity of social dreaming. London: Karnac.
Lusty, N. and Groth, N. (2013) Dreams and modernity: a cultural history. London: Routledge.
Spellberg, M. (2019) ‘On dream sharing and its purpose: the social contract of sensuous imagining’, Cabinet Magazine, 67, pp. 69–76.
Spellberg, M. (2022) ‘Prisoners of the dream: Inception and Coors, capitalism and pandemic dreaming’, Cabinet Magazine, 8 February [Online]. Available at: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/spellberg_matthew_8_february_2022.php (Accessed: 22 August 2025).
Tedlock, B. (1987) Dreaming: anthropological and psychological interpretations. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
Windt, J. (2015) Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zadra, A. and Stickgold, R. (2021) When brains dream: Exploring the science and mystery of sleep. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Dream Mapping tools
Dan Kennedy: Understory (2024)
<https://elsewhere.to/atlas> [Accessed 23rd August 2025].
Dan Kennedy and Kat Junker’s dream location graph: (2024)
<https://location-graph-dan.netlify.app/> [Accessed 23rd August 2025].
Jennifer Dumper: Oneironauticum (2007).
<https://oneironauticum.com/> [Accessed 23rd August 2025].
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AI, digital tech and psychology:
Mind Change: How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains ( 2015) Susan Greenfield, Rider.
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Digital tech and art and ecology:
Ways of Being, James Bridle, (2022) Penguin Books
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, James Bridle, (2018), Verso
Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Brain Sci.23, 793–1121. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X00004015
Foundations of Consciousness, Antti Revonsuo, (2017), Routledge
Annti Revonsuo, “Consciousness, Dreams, and Virtual Realities,” Philosophical Psychology 8 (1995): 14.
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History of dreaming
Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. Kelly Bulkeley. New York: New York University Press, 2008
Carnivals and Dreams: Pieter Bruegel and the History of the Imagination – Louise S. Milne, Published by Mutus Liber Books, 2011
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Anthropology of Dreaming (+ history + role dreaming within religions)
New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming Edited By Jeannette Mageo, Robin E. Sheriff
Bourguignon, Erika E. 1972. Dreams and altered states of consciousness in anthropological research. In Psychological anthropology. 2d ed. Edited by Francis L. K. Hsu, 403–434. Homewood, IL: Dorsey.
Bulkeley, Kelly, ed. 2001. Dreams: A reader on religious, cultural and psychological dimensions of dreaming. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Iain R. Edgar, Guide to Imagework: Imagination-Based Research Methods (European Association of Social Anthropologists) 2004, Routledge
Galinier, Jacques, Aurore Monod Becquelin, Guy Bordin, et al. 2010. Anthropology of the night: Cross-disciplinary investigations. Current Anthropology51:819–847. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
Lohmann, Roger Ivar, ed. 2003. Dream travellers: Sleep experiences and culture in the western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Von Grunebaum, G. E., and Roger Caillois, eds. 1966. The dream and human societies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
https://www.nature.com/articles/136969a0
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Malaysian Orang Asli Dreaming:
The Mystique of Dreams; A Search for Utopia Through Senoi Dream Theory by William Domhoff (1990), University of California Press
Theatre, Ritual and Transformation: Senoi Temiar, Sue Jennings, Routledge, (1995)Annti Revonsuo
Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher of mind.
Valli, K., and Revonsuo, A. (2009). The threat simulation theory in light of recent empirical evidence: a review. J. Psychol.122, 17–38.
Revonsuo, A., Tuominen, J., & Valli, K. (2015). The avatars in the machine: Dreaming as a simulation of social reality. In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.), Open MIND: 32(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
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Philosophy of Dreaming:
The philosophy of dreaming, Ben Springett: https://iep.utm.edu/dreaming-philosophy/#:~:text=Descartes’%20dream%20argument%20began%20with,are%20actually%20asleep%20and%20dreaming.
and https://www.thehumanfront.com/ten-questions-with-ben-springett/
https://www.academia.edu/40548985/Can_We_Know_About_the_Evolution_of_Dreaming
Contextual Philosophy:
Technic and Magic, The Reconstruction of Reality, Federico Campagna (Author), Timothy Morton (Preface), Bloomsbury Publishing, 31 May 2018
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A selection of Contemporary Artists working with Dreams and AI.
Iyo Bisseck : Dreaming beyond AI.
aurèce vettier/Paul Mouginot;
Agnieszka Kurant:
especially: Cyber Key to Dreams,(active from October 2021 to May 2022)
Kinnari Saraiya
In the Eye of a Dream
See also: Dreams and MIT Media Lab projects:
Sleep & Dream theme page: https://mitmedialab.info/SleepDream
Dream Hotel with Carsten Höller: https://mitmedialab.info/DreamHotel
MIT Museum Studio: https://mitmedialab.info/mitmuseumstudio
Flying Dreams: https://mitmedialab.info/FlyingDreams
Titus Ebbecke: We Walk the Line (2020)
Sam Lavigne: especially “Perfect Sleep” (2021)
Dan Kennedy: eg: Understory. (2024)
Sam Potter: Dream-Suite (2021)
Pinyao Liu & Keon Ju Lee: ReVerie (2023-)
A selection of Contemporary Artists working with the subject of Dreams:
The Dream Mapping Project,: by Alisa Minyukova, a Russian born artist, researcher and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist of religion specializing in dream research.
“THE DREAM MAPPING PROJECT is a global artists’ collective exploring the realm of dreaming. Produced by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley and curated by Alisa Minyukova, DMP bridges dream science with the creative process. We have found that the language of dreams points to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious — ancestral memory and experience common to all humankind.
Our immersive dream-sharing events and residencies have resulted in an ongoing series of films and performance works. Invited artists unravel layers of a particular dream using analytic methods, symbolism, and improvisation. The audience also becomes active participants, engaging directly in the creative process and contributing to the collective dream narrative.”
A+E COLLECTIVE : The Dream Turbine. See also :DREAMPAK.pdf
Creative Time is pleased to present Cosmologyscape (cosmologyscape.com), a multi-layered socially engaged public art project by Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta artist and composer known for her groundbreaking practice combining performance and machine learning, and Alisha B Wormsley, an artist and cultural producer known for leveraging art production toward the redistribution of resources and reimagination of Black futures. Cosmologyscape addresses the duality of dreams—as both individual tools of self-awareness and collective acts of imagination and world-building—and encourages the exploration of dreaming practices.
(13.6.’24)
Exit Night, Enter Light is a digital zine created collaboratively by the first-year master students in Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. Over a period of three months, they conceptualised, designed and produced this document under the theme of nightmares/daydreams— the dream in all forms.
(13.6.’24)
Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville: Dream Machine (1959)
Jonathan Borofsky: Dream drawings 1971-1987
Laurie Anderson: Institutional Dream Series (Sleeping in Public), 1972–73
Laurie Anderson intentionally fell asleep in public places in New York City and sought to have dreams unique to those spaces to better understand the city and its inhabitants. Institutions included public libraries, courthouses and amusement parks. “[I was] trying to sleep in different public places to see if the place can color my dreams,” she reflected.
RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p.38
Lygia Clark: Baba Antropofágica (1973). “I dreamt that I opened my mouth and took out a substance incessantly. As this was happening I felt as if I was losing my own internal substance, which made me very anguished mainly because I could not stop losing it. In the work I made afterwards, which I called Cannibalistic Slobber, people had cotton reels in their mouths to expel and introject the slobber.”
Susan Hiller: Dream Mapping, (1973)
Carolee Schneeman: ‘the source of all my work is poised between dreaming and waking’ (Coxhead, D. & Hiller, S., (1976). Dreams: Visions of the Night. New York: Crossroad Publishing. p.90).
Glenn Ligon: Dream Book series (1990-)
Jenny Holzer “In a dream you saw a way to survive…” (1991)
Shirin Neshat: Dreamers Trilogy (2013-2016)
Rodney Graham: eg; Vexation Island (1997)
Dream Hotel with Carsten Höller: https://mitmedialab.info/DreamHotel
The Interview: Carsten Höller & Adam Haar, by J.J. Charlesworth, 10 June 2024, ArtReview
Ruth Patir
Sleepers, 2017
Single-channel video, 16 min
https://www.ruthpatir.com/projects?i=4&m=text
The materials constituting Sleepers were originally gathered by American writer Sheila Heti* who asked people to send her their dreams about politicians-especially those involving former president Barack Obama. In response, Patir disclosed her own dream in which president Obama revealed his passion for pottery, and expanded Heti’s collection by inviting other individuals to partake in a dream workshop. In this ingenious film, sleepers share their dreamy visions and the feelings they elicit. Inspired by Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Patir’s work frames the dreams within a regime of meaning which forces a certain hierarchy on the symbols they contain. As such, Sleepers raises questions about the existence of political and semiotic regimes that structure our personal and public relations, and explores civilians’ relationship with their leaders as objects of desire.
* Sheila Heti’s THE METAPHYSICAL POLL
Tshepiso Moropa: Ditoro
Jim Shaw: Dream objects series (1994–), Dream drawing series.(1992–99)
Gala Hernández López –Dreams of Prophets (2025 – in production)
Victoria Rogers: Black Noise
Daria Martin: Tonight the World (2019) , One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt (2011), Harpstrings and Lava (2007)
Suzanne Treister: Scientific Dreaming (2022)
Saelyx Finna: Under the Dream (2024 – in production)
Sophie Bruneau and Marc-Antoine Roudil: Dreaming Under Capitalism (2018)
Amanda Rubin – THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS (2024 – in production)
Jane Rzheznikova and Alina Mikhaleva: Library of Dreams (2023-) is a multimedia documentary project exploring how the human psyche responds to life under oppressive regimes
Amak Mahmoodian: One Hundred and Twenty Minutes (2019-2023)
Nathalie Regard: Dream Sessions
Daniel Godinez Nivón: El Sueño del Oyamel (2024), Sun Murmur (2024), Oído de agua (2023), Propedéutico Onírico (2017) etc. Propedéutico Onírico/A Dream Propaedeutic by Spencer Bryne-Seres (2020)
Michelle Teran and Marc Herbst: “Learning and Dreaming Together through Uncertainty.” (2024) + .pdf (2022), To sleep together in comfort (This is Politics). (2021)
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A selection of Contemporary Artists using AI (critically)
Nora Al Badri: especially; The Post-Truth Museum, 2021-23
Hito Steyerl
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/these-renderings-do-not-relate-to-reality-hito-steyerl-on-the-ideologies-embedded-in-a-i-image-generators-22646
Trevor Paglen
https://sites.barbican.org.uk/trevorpaglen/
https://excavating.ai/
Pierre Huyghe:
But also cf; Anika Meier on Huyghe’s staging of Liminals in Berlin in 2026.
Also;
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboniare collaborating with artist Pierre Huyghe on “The Feral”, a massive, 1000-year AI-driven art project creating a cinematic landscape,
Phillipe Parreno: eg: Voices (2025), Munich’s Haus der Kunst
Sabrina Tirvengadum. eg: If We Were Marrier d’Unienville (2023)
Femke Herregraven investigates material realities, geographies, and value systems carved out by global finance and geopolitics. Spanning high-frequency trading, mineral mining, cat bonds, and algorithmic systems, her work makes tangible the effects of the financial and technological abstractions on ecosystems, historiography, and individual lives.
Gilchrist, Bruce (2022) Poetics of Artificial Intelligence in Art Practice: (Mis)apprehended Bodies Remixed as Language. Doctoral thesis https://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/14711/1/14711.pdf
Memo Atken: (2021) Deep Visual Instruments: Realtime Continuous, Meaningful Human Control over Deep Neural Networks for Creative Expression. Doctoral thesis
Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, and their collective practice 0rphan Drift (0D)
Paul Chan: eg; The Psychology of Your AI Self-Portrait
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
Jay Bernard – The Last X Years
Gregory Chatonsky: Completion 1.0
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Film:
dream structure and the subject of dreaming in contemporary cinema;
from Lucretia Martel (Argentina) to Apichatpong Weeresethakul (Thailand), Naomi Kawase (Japan) etc to David Lynch…etc.
INDEX OF FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES that feature dreams; Reviews by Deirdre Barrett.
Dreaming Under Capitalism. Dir. Sophie Bruneau – 63min – 2017 –
Language: French – Subtitles available in: English, Italian, Spanish.
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Sound:
Jon Hassell – Dream Theory in Malaya (1981)
Pauline Oliveros
- Sonic Meditations (1971–74) — A collection of text scores several of which directly invoke dream states. Meditation XIII: “Dream Horse” instructs performers to dream about horses collectively. Oliveros wrote extensively in Software for People (1984) about using hypnagogic states (the threshold between waking and sleep) as compositional material.
- Deep Listening (1989, recorded in a 14-second reverb cistern) — Oliveros traced the origin of the Deep Listening practice to a specific dream she had about listening to the planet, documented in her writings and interviews. The practice she developed around it explicitly uses borderline sleep states as a mode of perception.
- The Roots of the Moment (1988) — Oliveros described this as arising from what she called “dream logic,” non-linear associative structures drawn from sleep consciousness.see also: Listening in Dreams: A Compendium of Sound Dreams, Meditations And Rituals for Deep Dreamers by Ione, (2005) , Published by iUniverse
Terry Riley
- All-Night Concerts (1960s–70s) — Riley performed solo keyboard concerts lasting through the night, deliberately designed to push both performer and audience into trance and hypnagogic states. He described these explicitly in interviews as an attempt to reach the mental territory just before sleep — where repetition dissolves rational cognition.
- A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) — Riley has spoken about this piece arising from a vision/dream of a possible future world, and the circular drone structure was intended to induce the mind-loop quality of dreaming.
- Descending Moonshine Dervishes (1982) — Riley explicitly connected this to his study with Pandit Pran Nath, describing the late-night raga tradition as music designed for the dream-adjacent state of consciousness that deepens after midnight.Also, for example:
1. György Ligeti — Piano Études (Books I–III, 1985–2001) The best-documented case in the classical canon. Ligeti kept dream journals throughout his life and wrote in detail (in his collected writings and interviews with Paul Griffiths) about specific Études arising from recurring dreams — including dreams of impossible mechanical pianisms, of being trapped in sticky substances, and of hearing music that couldn’t physically be played. The Études are not impressionistically “dreamy” — they are structurally derived from dream logic.
2. La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela — Dream House (1969–ongoing) The installation is literally named for Young’s theoretical framework, which he called the “Dream” series from 1961 onward. Young wrote that sustained drone frequencies, held for hours or days, bring the listener to a neurological state indistinguishable from dreaming while awake. Dream House in its various permanent and temporary incarnations has been running as a living installation since 1979 in New York.
3. Morton Feldman — Late Works (especially Palais de Mari, 1986, and For Philip Guston, 1984) Feldman wrote and lectured at length (his collected essays Give My Regards to Eighth Street are essential here) about composing in a dream-like state — beginning each working day before fully waking, writing music in what he called “between sleep and the world.” He explicitly theorized that his long, quiet, unresolved late works replicated dream-structure: repetition with slight variation, no developmental logic, no arrival.
4. Robert Ashley — Automatic Writing (1979) Ashley suffered from Tourette’s syndrome and recorded his involuntary utterances — which he described as arising from a state between sleep and waking — layering them over Satie-esque organ. He documented this process in detail in his writings and described the result as an acoustic transcript of a mind not fully in control of itself, i.e. in a quasi-dreaming condition.
5. Karlheinz Stockhausen — Traum-Formel / LICHT cycle (1977–2003) Stockhausen claimed the entire 7-opera LICHT cycle was revealed to him in a vision/dream, and he wrote about this origin in his Texte zur Musik. Traum-Formel (“Dream Formula,” 1981) is a specific distillation of the cycle’s core melodic material, presented as the seed from which the dream-world of the operas grew. Whether one believes his cosmological account or not, the documented compositional claim is explicit.
6. Toru Takemitsu — I Hear the Water Dreaming (1987) The title is not decorative. Takemitsu wrote extensively (in Confronting Silence, 1995) about dreams as the primary source of his musical imagery, and about Japanese aesthetic concepts of ma (negative space/interval) as related to the logic of dreaming. I Hear the Water Dreaming for flute and orchestra, and Dream/Window (1985) for orchestra, both have accompanying written statements connecting them to specific dream experiences.
7. Éliane Radigue — ADNOS I–III (1973–80) and Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) Radigue’s work with tape loops and later the ARP synthesizer was explicitly designed around what she called “the threshold” — the audio equivalent of a hypnagogic state. She has spoken in interviews (particularly with The Wire and in the Intermediate Spaces documentary) about listening to her drones while in near-sleep states as part of the compositional process, using her own neurological response at the edge of sleep as a gauge.
8. Giacinto Scelsi — Quattro Pezzi (1959) and Aion (1961) Scelsi is an extreme case: he claimed to receive his music in trance states, and refused for years to be credited as composer, insisting he was merely transcribing sounds that came through him during altered-state sessions. His assistant Vieri Tosatti documented these sessions. The music — single sustained notes with microtonal inner vibration — is structurally consistent with what neuroscience identifies as audio hallucination patterns in REM sleep.
9. Max Richter — Sleep (2015) An 8-hour work explicitly composed for performance while the audience is asleep (in beds, on site). Richter collaborated with neuroscientist David Eagleman and wrote at length (in published interviews, liner notes, and a Guardian essay) about composing for the sleeping brain — specifically for the slow-wave sleep phase, and about what music can do to a dreaming mind rather than a waking one. Possibly the most ambitious direct engagement with sleep as performance context in the contemporary canon.
10. Harold Budd — The Plateaux of Mirror (1980, with Brian Eno) and The Serpent (in Quicksilver) (1981) Budd has spoken consistently across decades of interviews about composing in a state of deliberate mental vacancy — specifically describing lying half-asleep at the piano and playing whatever came. He described his aesthetic explicitly as “music that doesn’t assert itself,” music calibrated to the non-resistant, associative character of dreaming. Brian Eno’s liner notes to The Plateaux of Mirror engage directly with this theory.
11. Meredith Monk — Turtle Dreams (1983) Monk’s vocal and theatrical work has always been non-linear and visionary, but Turtle Dreams is the most directly documented dream-derived piece. She described the work in interviews as arising from dream imagery — slow, cycling, slightly wrong repetitions that mirror how dreams recycle and distort material. The piece’s structure deliberately refuses waking-state developmental logic.
12. Annea Lockwood — Duets for Voice and Drone (various) and her collaboration with Oliveros Lockwood, a close associate of Oliveros, has written about using extended listening sessions in dark, acoustically rich environments specifically to court hypnagogic hallucinations, and using those states as compositional starting points. Her Dream of the Marsh Wren (1978) draws on dream imagery, documented in liner notes and interviews.
Charlemagne Palestine (drone works and trance states),
Phill Niblock (sustained tones and near-sleep states),
Klaus Schulze (particularly Irrlicht, 1972, and Mirage, 1977, both of which he connected explicitly to dream-state consciousness in interviews).
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Fiction:
Literature;
Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood (1954)
Sylvia Plath: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1958)
Ursula Le Guinn: The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Ursula Le Guinn: The Word for World is Forest (1972)
Emma Tennant: Hotel de Dream (1976)
Christopher Priest: A Dream of Wessex (1977)
Laila Lalami. Dream Hotel (2025)
Nicholas Royle (Editor) The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams (1996)
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historical; medieval study of dreams
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Also; indigenous; other dream cultures. Anthropology
Bourguignon, Erika E. 1972. Dreams and altered states of consciousness in anthropological research. In Psychological anthropology. 2d ed. Edited by Francis L. K. Hsu, 403–434. Homewood, IL: Dorsey.
Argues that dreams form part of a continuum with trance-induced visions and spirit possession, with not all languages distinguishing semantically between these phenomena. Many cultures see all three as offering genuine access to supernatural agents, differing only in the social context of their production.
Bulkeley, Kelly, ed. 2001. Dreams: A reader on religious, cultural and psychological dimensions of dreaming. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
A collection of classic articles on dreaming, drawn from religious studies and psychology as well as anthropology. Includes anthropological works by Kracke 1981 (cited under Psychological and Psychoanalytic Anthropology) and Lohmann 2000 (cited under Dreams and Cultural Change/Continuity). There are also articles on the significance of dreams in Buddhism, Islam, and ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion.
Iain R. Edgar, Guide to Imagework: Imagination-Based Research Methods (European Association of Social Anthropologists) 2004, Routledge
A Guide to Imagework is a pioneering guide to a new trend in ethnographic research: the use of imaginative, experiential methods such as dreamwork, artwork, Gestalt theory and psychodrama. Originating in group counselling and psychiatric therapy, imagework techniques explore subjects’ imaginative resources to reveal unconscious knowledge about identity, belief and society. They are ideal for accessing rich qualitative data about how individuals and cultures function. Iain Edgar, a leading specialist on ethnographic method, has condensed top-level research theory on imagework into this handy practical manual. Complete with case studies and examples, hands-on tips and guidance on methods and ethics, it is an ideal starting point for any imagework project.
Galinier, Jacques, Aurore Monod Becquelin, Guy Bordin, et al. 2010. Anthropology of the night: Cross-disciplinary investigations. Current Anthropology51:819–847. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
DOI: 1086/653691 Eight French and two Italian anthropologists come together to propose that anthropology has badly neglected half of all human experience: the nighttime half. Includes seven commentaries (by Chenhall, Daveluy, Ekirch, Glaskin, Heijnen, Steger, and Wright) and a response by the original authors. Translated from French by Richard Crabtree
Lohmann, Roger Ivar, ed. 2003. Dream travellers: Sleep experiences and culture in the western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/9781403982476
A theoretically diverse collection of articles about dreaming in societies from New Guinea and aboriginal Australia (and one from Sulawesi). Authors not appearing elsewhere in this bibliography include Joel Robbins; Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern; Wolfgang Kempf and Elfriede Herrmann; Robert Tonkinson; Ian Keen; and Jane Goodale.
Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
A seminal collection of articles aimed at reinvigorating the anthropology of dreaming (which Tedlock deems to have fallen into neglect following the collapse of the Culture and Personality school) by exposing it to various psychological theories of dreaming. Authors include Gilbert Herdt, Bruce Mannheim, William Merrill, and John Homiak.
Von Grunebaum, G. E., and Roger Caillois, eds. 1966. The dream and human societies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
A highly eclectic collection of essays, including theoretical perspectives from neurophysiology, Jungian psychology, phenomenology, literary theory, and sociology; ethnographic reports from the Hopi, Ojibwa, and modern Mexico; and historical studies of dreams in ancient Greek, Mesopotamian, and Islamic literature. Anthropological contributors include George Devereux and Dorothy Eggan.
Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. Kelly Bulkeley. New York: New York University Press, 2008
From Biblical stories of Joseph interpreting Pharoh’s dreams in Egypt to prayers against bad dreams in the Hindu Rg Veda, cultures all over the world have seen their dreams first and foremost as religiously meaningful experiences. In this widely shared view, dreams are a powerful medium of transpersonal guidance offering the opportunity to communicate with sacred beings, gain valuable wisdom and power, heal suffering, and explore new realms of existence. Conversely, the world’s religious and spiritual traditions provide the best source of historical information about the broad patterns of human dream life
Dreaming in the World’s Religions provides an authoritative and engaging one-volume resource for the study of dreaming and religion. It tells the story of how dreaming has shaped the religious history of humankind, from the Upanishads of Hinduism to the Qur’an of Islam, from the conception dream of Buddhas mother to the sexually tempting nightmares of St. Augustine, from the Ojibwa vision quest to Australian Aboriginal journeys in the Dreamtime. Bringing his background in psychology to bear, Kelly Bulkeley incorporates an accessible consideration of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology into this fascinating overview.
Dreaming in the World’s Religions offers a carefully researched, accessibly written portrait of dreaming as a powerful, unpredictable, often iconoclastic force in human religious life.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40059845?seq=1 Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between Deborah Bird Rose.
From September 1980 to July 1982, Debbie conducted twenty-two months of ethnographic research among the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingarra in Australia’s Northern Territory. With her first major book, Dingo Makes us Human, she described a ‘Dreaming ecology’ that is ‘embedded in a system that has no centre’ (Citation1992, 220). In dialogue with her Yarralin teachers—especially Hobbles Danayarri—as well as thinkers like James Lovelock and Gregory Bateson, she described ecological systems composed of conscious beings who communicate, act and react, and ‘adhere as a matter of self-interest and free will to the same set of understandings’ (Citation1992, 220).
Cf; https://www.academia.edu/1566731/Dreams_and_Ethnography
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The Spiritual and Art:
The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, Jennifer Higgie, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, (2023)
In an illuminating blend of memoir and art history, The Other Side explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women artists. From the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen and the nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton to the pioneering Hilma af Klint, these women all – in their own unique ways – shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions.
Weaving in and out of their myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie considers the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.
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