Dreams and Visions: A Comparative Poetics.

This course offers an introduction to esoteric narratives of dreams and visions from antiquity to the present. Sources include the ancient Babylonian dreams of Gilgamesh; Jewish Merkabah mysticism; Cicero's Dream of Scipio and its resonance in mediaeval philosophy and cosmogony; hermetic tales of the prophet Muhammad's nocturnal ascension; Islamic mysticism, illuminationism, and dream literature; the practice of dream interpretation with the Kurdish Ahl-e Haqq; the role of dreams and visions in Islamic hagiographical texts; Emanuel Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams; and, finally, the cosmo-ecological thought of the Yanomami people of Brazil with its reversal of day and night. While a nod to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams will be indispensable, our focus will be on primary texts from across the world (poems, prose, and anthropological accounts) and their relevance to the shaping of alternative world views.