I am a professor of visual studies from Canada who has always been interested in dream life—although I’ll admit, it took me a long time to treat this domain as a serious research topic (sometimes the somberness of the academy can impede more adventurous pursuits). I created the Museum of Dreams as a place to explore the social and political significance of these visions, which has led to amazing collaborations with institutions, communities, and individuals around the world. I hope this list has inspired you to attend more closely to your own dreams!
This was my gateway book to the politics of dream life.
An incredible example of the ways dreams can provide another way of seeing reality—and indeed, how they can sometimes offer a clearer view of what is happening than any conscious narrative can.
I’ve read many accounts of the moment when Hitler came to power, but somehow this collection of dreams gathered by a Berlin-based journalist in 1933 manages to offer the most vivid account of what it felt like to live through this moment. These dreams convey the emotional force of the Third Reich, unlike anything else.
"This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state-or is worried they're about to find out."-Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
The hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evil
Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she…
This book broke my heart—in the best possible way.
Imagine a biopic about Scheherazade, but in this version, it’s a coming-of-age story of a Palestinian American woman who grew up between Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, and is now a 30-something poet living in Brooklyn.
And instead of compulsively telling stories to keep a murderous king enthralled, she compulsively tells stories to hold her marriage together while struggling with addiction and infertility. And her dreams are the backbone holding it all together.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • AN ELECTRIC LITERATURE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family's exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future.
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the…
Many people from all walks of life, even after many accomplishments and experiences, are often plagued by dissatisfaction, pervasive longing, and deep questioning. These feelings may make them wonder if they are living the life they were meant to lead.
Living on Purpose is the guidebook these people have been…
I know what you’re thinking, “Freud, really?” Yes, really.
This is one of the origins of that wildly counterintuitive idea that the best way to enlarge the scope of your world is to pay attention to your dreams. But apart from specialized scholars and practicing clinicians, who can read all 700 pages of his giant tomb, The Interpretation of Dreams?
Even Freud realized he needed a shorter book for his ideas to reach the public. So, he produced this “brochure” (as he called it) aimed at a general audience. All of his big ideas are here—dream-work, day residues, the unconscious—but in a much more manageable size.
And reading it offers proof that psychoanalysis remains as vital today as it did when it was invented 125 years ago.
Among the first of Sigmund Freud's many contributions to psychology and psychoanalysis was The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, and considered his greatest work - even by Freud himself. Aware, however, that it was a long and difficult book, he resolved to compile a more concise and accessible version of his ideas on the interpretation of dreams. That shorter work is reprinted here. Since its publication, generations of readers and students have turned to this volume for an authoritative and coherent account of Freud's theory of dreams as distorted wish fulfillment.
After contrasting the scientific and popular views of…
One of my all-time favourite books and one of the greatest narratives about the power of the imagination.
Picture books are the best teachers of ideas because they delight the eye and because the lessons they offer never feel didactic. The opening chapter of this book offers one of the most unforgettable lessons about how to see that dimension of the visible world that is not given to sight.
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as 'The Little Prince'. Richard Howard's new translation of the beloved classic-published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's birth-beautifully reflects Saint-Exupery's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this new edition has been restored to match in detail and in colour Saint-Exupery's original artwork. By combining the new…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
This book was my survival guide for facing a serious illness.
I learned so much from the way this self- described “Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” remade herself in the process of recovering from cancer. Lorde is a prophet of radical transformation. And one of her key tools was her dreams.
She taught us that change comes from looking inward and by giving voice to what one finds there. And the book contains one of the most amazing dreams I’ve ever read: near the end of her life, Lorde dreamt she wanted to take a course in “language crazure”: the study of “the formation and crack and composure of words.”
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
A Penguin Classic
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself…
An Alphabet for Dreamers opens a new conversation about the politics of dream life. In an innovative and playful format, the book demonstrates how these visions work to transform our most profound social conflicts.
Thinking alongside the dreams of ordinary and extraordinary people—from Harriet Tubman to a Covid-ward doctor—readers learn how dreams are transports for critical knowledge and a key resource for generating new worlds and new ways of being.
