Multiple methodologies are combined to chart more systematically the landscape of dream-worlds.
Principal Investigators:
Dr Marco Bernini, Assistant Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies, English Studies, marco.bernini@durham.ac.uk
Dr Ben Alderson-Day, Assistant Professor – Research, Psychology, benjamin.alderson-day@durham.ac.uk
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.
