Recent work in the brain sciences suggests that humans are daydreaming 47% of the day and dreaming at night in all stages of sleep. This is a fundamental shift in the way we frame human cognition and experience. We are primarily imaginative creatures; Most of our thought occurs in worlds that might be. And yet we have little language and few tools to interact with our dreaming minds. Many of us ignore our dream life entirely, forget the worlds we make, and share them with no one. What would it mean to attend more fully to our imagining? Can dreaming be a 21st century ‘technique’ for waking life? Can our waking hours, in turn, feed a more beautiful dream life?
This hands-on seminar will put us in touch with these questions, with a particular focus on self-experimentation. We will do this with an eye to dreaming as an expanded mode of perception which we can access even while awake. Dreaming attention is radically unselective, undivided, and nonlinear. The dreamer holds hallucination, disorder and madness close at hand. What would it mean to bring this expansive attention into the day, and daydream more fully? To attend to a landscape in a dream, and then to wake up and walk in it again? This seminar course is focused not on what dreams are, but instead on what this dream-like attention does, and what we can do with it.
Over the course of three weeks, we will read the latest papers on Dream Engineering, then apply their techniques, in practice, to our own dreaming selves. The hope is to explore new modes of attention together — fed by dreams, and feeding dreams in turn. We will read texts on neuroscience, tech ethics, and philosophy of mind. Past knowledge is encouraged but by no means required.
Taught by Adam Haar, an artist, technologist, and scientist specializing in dreams.