Collective Dreams

How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?

This book links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling which runs deep through experiences of socially transformative moments. The author has extensively studied the structure of feelings that encompasses the experiences not only of activist minorities but the broader mass of revolutionary movements. In certain historical moments, hopes and aspirations bind together millions of people from all walks of life: students, workers, farmers, and middle-class professionals. Nagaty calls this phenomenon the “collective dream”, something which has been carried through generations of Egyptians. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of social movement studies, cultural studies and cultural sociology.

Dreams Beyond Time describes a variety of dream types related to non-ordinary and exceptional dreams, including mythic, paranormal, and transpersonal dreaming. The book describes a metaphysics of discovery as intrinsic to dreaming in a pan-sentience cosmos, where dreams reveal human potential for personal spiritual development.

From visions of a past life to glimpses of the future, history is full of accounts of unusual dreams. This fascinating book explores historical, scientific, and cross-cultural research on these sorts of extraordinary dreams, and offers practical suggestions on how to work with them—either individually or as a member of a dream group—to enhance one's intellectual, emotional, and spiritual health. Each chapter is devoted to a particular type of dream, and presents a summary of research data on their nature. Specific categories of dreams discussed include creative, lucid, out-of-body, pregnancy, healing, collective, telepathic, clairvoyant, precognitive, past-life, initiation, and spiritual visitation dreams, as well as dreams within dreams. Entertaining and instructive, this book points the way to an expanded conception of human potential for the twenty first century.

The Fictions of Dreams explores the close connection between the narrative nature of dreams and the narrative devices employed in literature and creative writing. The book is unique in its confluential approach, linking the fictions of dreams with literary fictions and case studies which illuminate the centrality of dream analysis in therapeutic work. Dreams and literature are closely related. The dream's essence lies in its narrative facility. Dreams are autobiographical fictions which tell the story of the dreamer's life history, her insertion in transgenerational family themes, and her ethnic and cultural identity. In that sense dreams are psycho-social depositories and makers, not unlike what can be found in world literature: the recreation of interiority and historicity of a given time period. The interconnected worlds of dreaming and fiction writing tend to employ the same narrative devices: the memorial mode (Patrick Modiano), multi-temporality (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), poeisis (Kafka, Ted Hughes, Colm Toibin), historical consciousness (Irene Nemirowsky), and 'infinite connectivity' (Patrick White).

A detailed and comprehensive examination of dreams, following the courses of the series of dreams of a young university student and a middle-aged woman. Describes the unfolding of these dreams and relates them to the lives of the two individuals. Presents dreams as a wealth of creative possibilities, locked in the unconscious, on which we can draw by learning to understand and relate them to our lives.