We often talk about dreams as a phenomenon that occurs in our private world of sleep, but dreams may also leak across the border of sleep into our waking lives, may be shared and expanded in collaboration with others, or may already be embedded inside reality.

In this class, we’ll consider the possibilities offered by dreams and dream-states by diving into a variety of dream texts—including our own. We’ll keep dream journals, develop our own dream lexicons, and practice dreaming together. We’ll use meditative, Deep Listening practices to better evoke dream states, play with them, and move them into our living and writing space, with the goal of generating new kinds of writing and thinking in our practice. Because there are many ways to work with dreams, we need not limit ourselves to any single genre or media of exploration.

As we work with our own dreaming-writing, we’ll also read, or view, a number of oneiric texts by artists and authors such as Cesar Aira, Banana Yoshimoto, CD Wright, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Jackie Wang, or others. We will not tax ourselves to define what a dream “is,” but rather what possibilities dreaming offers our lives and writing—including new topographies, logics, sounds, gestures, and modes of composition. In this class, you can expect creative experiments, collaboration, and play in our shared dreaming space. Overall, we’ll open up our writing practice to new rituals, deep intuitions, and previously undreamed-of possibilities.

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• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium

• Homework: Required

• Workshopping Drafts: Optional

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