Louise Krasniewicz Penn Museum, Senior Research Scientist
Project
Dreaming Arnold Schwartzegger
For twenty years, Dr. Krasniewicz and her colleague Michael Blitz (CUNY) have been conducting research on the importance of American cultural icons, in particular, Arnold Schwartzenegger. Part of this work has been published as a book, Why Arnold Matters: The Rise of a Cultural Icon (2004). This project had particular bearing on the analysis of the 2003 California recall election.
In the course of conducting their research, Dr. Krazniewicz and her colleague experienced a surprising side effect: they found they dreamed regularly about Mr. Schwartznegger. They began to carefully document those dreams as a source of “peripheral” data. They posit, drawing from the work of the late Bert States, that dreams might work as a sort of “metaphor machine” that constructs new, perhaps more creative connections in cultural work. Avoiding more traditional methods of dream analysis, the researchers have used cognitive science and linguistic theory in order to consider dreams as an attempt at the categorization of new experience and information.
Natasha Lee Bryn Mawr, Assistant Professor, French
Project
Dreams and Sleep in the French Enlightenment
Dr. Lee’s current manuscript project, “Unsettling Signs: Society, Nature and the Novel, 1760–1802,” explores the relation between French novels of the late eighteenth century and the increasingly dominant discourses of science in the Enlightenment. In this project, she examines how the emergence of the French novel can be seen not simply through the rise of sentimentality, but also through the double lens of interiority and its relation to science—a double lens that also defines dreams.
Whether direct reflections of an inner self, a visionary state that grants a view of a future world, or the non-conscious workings of the mind, dreams occupy a central place in eighteenth century fiction as a truth that must be written and requires language to be recorded. By their virtual nature, dreams “double” literature. French Enlightenment novelists thus find in dreams the vindication of fiction: dreams—the realm of the possible—are scientific phenomena that are carefully tracked and observed by fiction. Dreams, unlike history, are not necessarily even truth-like, but possible truths.
Lázaro Lima Bryn Mawr College, Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Latino Studies
Project
Dream Nation: The Nationalist Visions and Dream Weavers of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement
In 1954 Lolita Lebrón and three men entered the United States House of Representatives armed with weapons. Draped in the Puerto Rican flag, Lebrón took the lead and shouted, “Freedom for Puerto Rico!” while firing four shots in protest of Puerto Rico’s occupation by the United States. She was incarcerated for twenty-five years and in her prison journals she had ample time to reflect on the dreams and mystic visions that lead her to carry out the attack; ultimately publishing selections in her book, A Message from God in the Atomic Age. The book—or word of it—converted many Puerto Ricans to the Nationalist cause; a fact stymied by various plebiscites that have not taken into account the Nationalist boycott of the plebiscite process which was initiated by one of the independence movement’s principal leaders, Pedro Albizu Campos.
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the Puerto Rican independence movement spearheaded by founding Nationalists such as Pedro Albizu Campos and Lebrón is the role of dreams and visions in their political program. Long ignored by a post-Enlightenment call to “reason,” these cultural and political dream weavers and visionaries have been cast outside the empirically driven economy of academic study by methodologies of the social sciences that cannot always apprehend the profound ability of mystic dreams—literal and metaphorical—to change hearts and challenge political institutions.
Dr. Lima studies these dream-weavers in the context of a highly visual public culture that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century and created a counter-public sphere (Habermas) of meaning that competed for the hearts and minds of Puerto Ricans in and out of the island. He examines the dreams, literature, photographs, visual arts, political cartoons, and speeches of Puerto Rico’s principal nationalist figures (from Pedro Albizu Campos and Lolita Lebrón to visual artists such as Antonio Martorell and the collaborative work of “Estudio 17” [which led to the creation of the Center for Puerto Rican Art]) and proposes a respectful engagement (though decidedly non-canonical) with a broader mystic tradition in Catholicism that has culminated in politically viable “dream-quests” (e.g., Latin American “Liberation Theology” being on of the most prominent).
Gregory M. Reihman Lehigh University, Adjunct Professor and Faculty Development Director
Project
Dream Arguments in Eastern and Western Philosophy
Dr. Reihman considers how Western and Chinese philosophers have used dreams in arguments about reality. In particular, he analyzes and compares Descartes’ and Zhuangzi’s dream arguments to see how these arguments ground views of reality, identity, and ethics.
Philosophers who raise metaphysical questions about the nature of reality often do so by first appealing to illusions, dreams, or some other category of appearances. They establish criteria that demarcate the real in terms of what is taken as the unreal. The most prominent example from the Western tradition is Descartes’ dream argument the Mediations on First Philosophy, in which he strives for evidence that could convince a skeptic that certain perceptions are real and not mere dreams. A similar move occurs in Zhuangzi’s ‘Butterfly Dream’ argument in which, after awakening from a dream in which he was a butterfly, Zhuangzi wonders whether he was Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterfly, or if he is now a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. He writes, “Between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, we ought to be able to find some sort of distinction. This is what is known as Thing Changing.”
Dr. Reihman explores the similarities and differences between these two dream arguments. How do they work? Are they convincing? What presuppositions do they rely on? What challenges might be raised against them? He then connects the arguments to the larger worldviews of the authors, showing how the ontological commitments made during the dream arguments shape decisions made elsewhere in their philosophies.
