Writing a Dream Class for the World Wide Web
Course Outline
Here is a brief outline of the lessons and assignments. This outline is also available on the registration page for the course:
Lesson #1 - Introduction to Dreaming
Summary: The latest psychological, clinical and cross cultural scholarly work into these remarkable experiences of the night are offered so that the student can develop a working understanding of the process of dreaming. How to recall dreams and techniques for dream diarying are covered.
Assignment: Class registrants are asked to fill out a basic demographic questionnaire including questions concerning their sleeping and dreaming habits and preferences and selected items from Kuiken's "Dream Response Questionnaire". A feature of this and future assignments is that for some of the closed ended questions students can find out how most people answer it before they answer it. Although this compromises any potential research integrity of the questions it enhances the students choices and thus the learning experience.
Lesson #2 - What Do Most People Dream About?
Summary: The typical content of peoples dreams is presented followed by techniques for ascertaining the content of ones own dreams relative to the Hall and VandeCastle norms. The cultural or other group relativity of these norms is pointed out to the student. It is again stressed that the dreamer and not the course instructor, friends, psychotherapists, scientists or anyone else is the owner of their dream and thus the final authority on his/her dream.
Assignment: The dreamer is asked to answer various questions about the content of their typical dreams. College student norms from this dream questionnaire are available to the student for selected items. The students aggregate responses will be classified as a function of sex and other demographic variables as considered appropriate (i.e., country, ethnic group, age, etc.) and fed back to the individual students via e-mail. Eventually these data will also be available to the student as he/she takes the class.
Lesson #3 - Dreamwork Tools & Techniques
Summary: In this assignment the role of metaphor in interpreting dreams is stressed although the pure enjoyment value of dreams is also pointed out. Two techniques are presented in this lesson. First is a technique which I compiled from various sources and is designed to be done by the individual working alone. I also included Gayle Delaney's Definition Dream Analysis technique.
Assignment: There are two parts to the assignment. In the first part the student is asked to work with a dream of their own and generate metaphors within a closed ended, multiple option question form. This allows them to both get in touch with the concept of metaphor and to get some feel for their own metaphoric system used in their dreams. This exercise is in part taken from research done by Don Kuiken on dream metaphor and in part is an original design for this course and can be done up to ten times. Following the metaphor exercise, students are asked to do the individual guided imagery technique discussed in this lesson which I designed. As part of doing the individual technique they are asked to answer largely closed ended questions regarding the directions they went with each step in the technique.
Lesson #4 - Dream Connectedness
Summary: In this lesson dreams are discussed from the perspective of family, community, and culture. Although dreams are certainly a deeply personal experience there are many ways in which dreams can be viewed in a broader context. It is pointed out that this broadening leaves the individual dreamer with a sense of "connectedness" ranging from dreaming about members of ones family to a dream about an organization to which the student may belong to a "spiritual" dream leaving the student with a feeling of connection to the divine. This lesson begins with a brief discussion of the contemporary dreamwork movement and an introduction to a community based dreamwork technique designed by Montaque Ullman. This community connectedness theme is then continued with a discussion of the dream attitudes and practices of North American Native peoples; Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetypal dreams which emerge from it; and finally the work on lucid/witnessing dreams which is conceptualized from a neo-Hindu point of view.
Assignment: The student is given a choice of one of two assignments. One of them is based on Ullman's group dream interpretation technique. They have an opportunity to join a dream group of others from the class and with their input process one of their own dreams. Limitations and cautions around participating in this assignment are pointed out to the student. If students choose to participate there are various procedures which have been put in place to make this a psychologically "safe" activity. For instance, responses to a dream will not go directly to other group members but rather they will be routed through the server with certain criterion for wording (i.e., "In my dream . . . ") and then sent on to the dreamer and other group members stripped of e-mail addresses. A second assignment choice is offered. This one is a dream problem solving task where the dreamer is asked to put their dream to work to solve a current problem in their life.
Lesson #5 - Selected Topics and Future Directions
Summary: The point of this lesson is to give the student a brief overview of the various directions one can go when studying dreams. Drawing on the work of Harry Hunt I point out that from the perspective of most people it is the intensified forms of dreaming that are provocative. They are certainly the dreams that we easily recall. All the cultures of the world have spoken of these intensified forms of dreaming although in the dream research literature the scientific emphasis has been on collecting dreams from the dream laboratory.
Assignment: After filling out a course evaluation and indicating any interest in taking future dream modules, students will be offered the opportunity to receive a list of e-mail addresses of others in the class who are interested in pursuing group dreamwork. This list will be narrowed by individually selected demographic variables so one student will get no more than a dozen names and e-mail addresses of people who shared an interest in a certain set of demographics (i.e., an all female group).
Each lesson/assignment is made available at a prearranged date and students enter the lesson and/or assignment on or after that date from the home page by clicking on the title of the summary or assignment (in italics above). The course runs for six weeks (one lesson/assignment takes two weeks). It costs $39 (US) or $49 (Canadian).
Also available on the dream course home page is a list of dream information related to the course. These include:
Student Bulletin Board
This is a bulletin board which is kept active for the duration of the class. Students are encouraged to post messages about the class or about their particular interest in dreams on the board. Students are encouraged to use appropriate netequitte when posting to the community board. It is monitored by the instructor in order to ensure that inappropriate postings are deleted and/or contextualized.
Dream Resource Page
A list of recommended books and links to dream related web sites.
Book List: The books listed here on dreams have been suggested by the educational committee of the Association for the Study of Dreams as especially appropriate for the general reader. A much more comprehensive list is also available at the ASD Home Page (a link is provided to that list on the ASD web site).
Dream Links On The Net: An annotated list of links follows a qualifier about linking to other dream sites on the Internet. Appendix A has the qualifier and list of links. This gives the student some idea of what else is available and addresses the potential problems with linking.
Course Bibliography
A list of books and articles used in writing the course.
About the Author
Some biographical information about the instructor, including the her photograph and a link to her full curriculum vitae. This statement was written to appeal to the general public’s sense of expertise and can be found in Appendix B. The link to the full vitae allows those who want more details about the nature of the instructors credentials to have such access.
Acknowledgments
Information about the people who worked on this course is linked to from here.
About the Artwork
The painting at the start of each lesson are by the course author/instructor. More information about these "dream inspired" art works is linked here.
Contact the Instructor
When students click here they are taken to an e-mail submission form with the e-mail address of the course instructor already in the send box.