This chapter discusses the significance of opium during the early nineteenth-century and its relationship to Romanticism. While the chapter is organized around the influential work of Thomas De Quincey, particularly his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it also discusses the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It discusses Romantic theories about the significance of dreams and their...
LSHTM Research OnlineMay 19, 2018Nadia Judith Bijaoui, Joshua Bernstein, Christine Markham et al.
The science of dreams and their interpretation may seem like a recent trend, justifying current research interests. Yet, for centuries, dream science, once called oneirology, has captivated dreamers in quest of meanings and motivated scientists in search of explanations. Due to the recent expansion of dream research this narrative review discusses and explores relationships between dreaming and...
The basic principle of folklore is constant—unveiling the hidden riches within the ordinary things of everyday life: a fine contribution to, and coordination with, the humanities. Examples are the study of the oral/orality; life stories of the obscure; practices of ‘hidden’ amateur musicians, studied ethnographically rather than through written scores or the ‘great’ composers; research by...
The fact that dreams occur when waking consciousness is diminished is one way of understanding Sigmund Freud&s;s dictum that dreams are the via regia to the unconscious. Most dreams are reported just prior to waking and the average dream lasts for several minutes. Although the phenomenology of dreams has been exhaustively catalogued, no overarching theory of dreams has been developed. C. G....
The dream communicates a symbolic narrative, but few modern dreamers can fully appreciate its significance without assistance. The day residue represents perceptions registered while awake that appear in the dream of the same night. Whereas memories contribute to dreams, there is little reason to conclude that when embroidered into the dream narrative that they refer to actual past events. It...
May 8, 2018Nigel Hamilton, Aaron Balick, Alexandra Chalfont et al.
In David&s;s initiation dream, he has a glimpse into the awakening ahead and finds that: "lights and colours of every hue are all manifest in this vast heavenly space". Darkness is acting as a veil protecting us from premature exposure to the hidden, psychic forces of our inner world. Mystical experiences of colour and light have in common the sense of attention and consciousness being totally...
When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst...
What is your earliest unequivocal childhood memory and how old were you at the time? And how much might that and similar events around that time have influenced your life subsequently? During the Battle of Britain, in late summer 1940, when I was 6 months old, and for the next 18 or so months, my mother and I were evacuated to a small town in North Yorkshire, Selby. For some reason she always...
Within the past couple of decades, art-historical scholarship has developed a more acute awareness of the need to reassess and re-evaluate its dominant narratives. It has become apparent that the value judgements that have guided modernist historiography can no longer be taken for granted, and there has been an ever-increasing demand for more diverse perspectives. One central issue which has...
CHI Extended AbstractsApril 20, 2018A. Horowitz, Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar et al.
Current HCI research overlooks an opportunity to create human-machine interaction within the unique cognition ongoing during dreams and drowsiness. During sleep onset, a window of opportunity arises in the form of Hypnagogia, a semi-lucid sleep state where we begin dreaming before we fall fully unconscious. To access this state, we developed Dormio, the first interactive interface for sleep,...