The Dream Journal
An Introduction for Artists, Writers, and Anyone Who Wants to Know What’s Going On in Their Own Heads
With Bernard Welt
SUNDAY APRIL 19th 11:30am - 1:30pm
photograph by Francesca Woodman, 1978
Netflix isn’t the only game in town, you know. Every night you dream scenarios and situations enough to keep a housebound audience occupied for days. Mostly we lose these dreams before we have a chance to appreciate them, and that’s ok. We’re not going to catch everything offered on Hulu, either.
But in preserving our dreams, and devoting to them the kind of attention we would to a good book or movie, we may just find, as countless artists, scholars and scientists have done, sources of insight and inspiration, and a deeper understanding of ourselves. The dream journal has been a part of creative practice for thousands through the ages, and it can work for you—enhancing intuition, appreciation of symbol and metaphor, self-awareness, and a sympathetic view of others. Even if you never remember your dreams, you can easily master a few simple tricks to catch them before they fly away, and establish a practice for keeping a dream journal, tracking dreams, and drawing upon them as a resource for inspiration and insight.
This two-hour workshop will introduce that practice, with digressions into the modern psychology and neurobiology of dreaming as well as dream theory in other eras and cultures. We can discuss participants’ patterns of dreaming as time permits. Come with questions if you like.
This is a layperson’s introduction to dreams and dreaming. Dr. Welt is a professor of humanities, not psychology, with long experience in guiding dream-sharing groups and workshops on the dream journal as a practice for artists and writers.
Bernard Welt is Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University. He is a former member of the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the co-author, with Phil King and Kelly Bulkeley, of Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education (State University Press of New York), the first major academic study of the use of dreams in education. His essays and lectures on dreaming and the arts, especially film, have established him as an authority on the topic. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, and he has received a National Endowment fir the Arts Fellowship in Writing and a Lambda Book Award nomination.