Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition An Interdisciplinary Framework

Dreams have been fascinating multiple disciplines for centuries, from philosophy and literature to contemporary cognitive science. Why we dream remains an enduring mystery, but cognitive research on dream has experienced a new wave of interest in recent years. Breakthroughs in the experimental study of dreaming are provoking multiple questions about the experiential qualities of dreams and the potential insights they might disclose for larger issues such as consciousness, the self, and our relationship with reality. How does our enactive and cognitive experience of reality permeate into dreams, and vice-versa? What makes dreams immersive and world-like experiences?? And are dreams narrative experiences, or experiences that we only later narrativize?

Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition answers these questions with an interdisciplinary framework encompassing not just the psychological sciences but the full breadth of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Driven by the interdisciplinary project, Threshold Worlds, based at Durham University in the autumn of 2020, this volume combines multiple methodologies to chart a more systematic landscape of dream-worlds. This includes co-constructing exploratory models, experimental designs, and phenomenological enquiries, as well as the collaborative interpretation of existing data from dream reports. It covers the themes of narrativity, permeability, immersivity, and reportability through original and interdisciplinary contributions from cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, narrative theorists, philosophers of mind, theologians, and artists.

Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of this work are available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. These parts of the work are free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Marco Bernini is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies at Durham University's English Studies Department. His research focuses on narrative theory and cognitive science for the interdisciplinary study of consciousness, self, and imagination across a variety of media, cognitive processes, and mental states. He also worked on applying the extended mind view to creative writing and authorial intentionality, and on a narrative approach to cognitive theories of complexity and emergence. He has recently established and leads the 'Narrative and Cognition Lab' at Durham University and is the author of Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models and Exploratory Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Ben Alderson-Day is a Professor of Psychology and the Co-Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University. He completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2012 before working on Hearing the Voice at Durham University for over 10 years. He is the co-founder of the Early Career Hallucinations Research group and the Scientific Chair of the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development.

1. Introduction, Marco Bernini and Ben Alderson-DayPart 1: Permeability and Immersivity2. Exploring the Permeable Boundaries Between Sleeping and Dreaming Bodies: Affective and Somatosensory Modulation of Dream Experience, Michelle Carr and Elizaveta Solomonova3. Dreaming Spirits: Animism, Absorption, and Amplification, Adam J. Powell4. Day and Night Dream Permeability: New Evidence and Future Research Directions, Giulia Poerio5. Dreams and Heightened Narrowed Immersivity: Combining Saturation, Permeability, Presentationality, and Presence, Marco Bernini6. The Concept of Dreaming as a World, Antti Revonsuo and Jarno Tuominen7. Those Who Walk Beyond the Threshold: Lucid Dreamers, Boundary Experiences, and the Hypnagogic Body, Ben Alderson-DayInterlude8. 'That feeling of trying to grasp onto something': An Interview with Lucie Treacher, John Foxwell and Lucie TreacherPart 2: Narrativity and Reportability9. Formative Processing: Dreaming and Narrative Form, Richard Walsh10. Nothing is Everything!, Sowon Park11. Plans and Scattered Notions in Dream Reports, Science, and History, John Sutton12. Baruchello's Dream Topographies, Peter Schwenger13. Writing Dreams and the Self: The Case of Simon Forman (1552-1611), Niall BoyceCoda14. Alterations of Microdreaming by Intentional Pre-Sleep Imagery, Tore Nielsen