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The Craft of Writing – Dream Plays
R1B - 001 | CCN: 31603
Jonathan Haynes
Date and Time: MWF 10-11A, 263 DWINELLE
4 Units
Where do dreams come from? What purposes do they serve? Are we free in our dreams, or do they enslave us (or both)? Is there an art of dreaming? How is art-making, and the enjoyment of art, like dreaming? Are we dreaming or dreamt (at the movies, when we sleep, at work)? If we are dreamt, who or what is dreaming us? Endeavoring to explore, if not answer these questions, this course will delve into the cinema of dreams and dreamers. In works ranging from Chuang-tsi to Alice in Wonderland to avant-garde films to a recent report from Science magazine, we will find dreams aestheticized, analyzed, technologized, and even personified (in the form of the comic book hero, The Sandman), as artists, scientists, and philosophers attempt to represent the ultimate borderland – the space-time between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and the unconscious, the sensual universe and the world of abstraction, the quotidian and the divine. Films will include Un chien andalou (Buñuel/Dali 1928), The Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939), Persona (Bergman 1966), Mulholland Drive (Lynch 2000). Required texts will include Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) and A Dream Play (Strindberg), as well as a slim course reader.