Project Summary
An Interdisciplinary Project on Dreams, Narrative and Liminal Cognition
Cognitive research on dreams has experienced a new wave of interest in recent years. The increasing amount of phenomenological and neuroscientific data about dreaming, however, is provoking a number of questions about the experiential qualities of dreams and the potential insights they might disclose for larger issues such as consciousness, the self, social cognition, and our relationship with reality. How does our enactive and cognitive experience of reality permeate into dreams and vice-versa? What makes dreams immersive and world-like experiences? How can dreams inform, and be informed by, models of imaginary or hallucinatory liminal states? What is the specific narrative texture (or lack of narrativity) in dreams?
Such questions call for an interdisciplinary investigation, whereby multiple methodologies are combined to chart more systematically the landscape of dream-worlds. This includes co-constructing exploratory models which will guide experimental designs and phenomenological enquiries, as well as the interpretation of existing data from dream reports. A key part of this endeavour is to understand the relationships between dreams and other imaginary ontologies, such as hallucinatory experiences and narrative story-worlds. We propose to bring together cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, narratologists, dream cartographers, and artists, to work towards a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of dreaming.
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Term: Michaelmas 2020
Project Fellows
Principal Investigator: Dr Marco Bernini (English Studies)
Principal Investigator: Dr Ben Alderson-Day (Psychology)
- Professor Richard Walsh
- Lucie Treacher
- Dr Armando D’Agostino
- Dr Sowon Park
- Project Affiliates
- Affiliated Centres
University of YorkRichard Walsh is a narratologist and founder/director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies at the University of York.
International Archive of DreamsLucie Treacher is a performer and artist, and founder/director of the International Archive of Dreams in London. The archive, funded by Arts Council England, is the first research-led online archive of dreams where an interdisciplinary team of psychologists and visual designers are coding, representing and exploring dream-worlds.
Dr Armando D’Agostino is a consultant psychiatrist and internationally-recognised expert in sleep and dreaming in psychiatric disorders. His research spans disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder, and combines methods from functional neuroimaging, psychopharmocology, and descriptive psychopathology.
UC Santa BarbaraSowon Park is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies at UC Santa Barbara and specializes in modernism and the unconscious. The founder of the Unconscious Memory Network, she is now pursuing her research on the representation of altered states of consciousness, such as dreams.
