I have taken a change of direction, and
decided instead to do my paper on dreaming. The dream world is
something that has always fascinated me, and for good reason since I
think it's the source for a lot of humanity's creative and
imaginative resources, especially for us as writers. Dreams have
acted as a wellspring of information for psychologists, story
tellers, evolutionary survival tactics, and is something that every
living creature throughout every age has had in common. Like so many
other ideas, a paper on dreaming is something that I've always wanted
to write but never gotten around to.
I really don't want to get too specific
about my topic yet because I want to start out very broad and then
wait and see what roads it will lead me down, and focus it there. But
I was thinking for primary research, it would be interesting to get
some volunteers (friends, family, myself) to start recording their
dreams in a journal. The journal could consist of anything from the
events in the dream to how it made the person feel. Of course, the
more brutal the honesty there is, and the more the participants are
willing to share their dreams, the better the results will be. From
there I could maybe develop some questions to ask as well. With the
raw materials, and my creative inspiration, in place already, my
secondary research could take me down many different, and equally
interesting, venues. Of course, there is the research done by Jung
(with his collective human unconscious) and Freud (with his dream
interpretation) that would give plenty of psychological background.
There is also the more pseudo-scientific realm of lucid, or
conscious, dreaming that has always been a personal favorite of mine.
Secondary sources would be much harder to come by with this sort of
thing, though. Then last but not least, there are the fascinating
dream cultures of the world that place a high priority on what goes
on behind our eyelids at night, and use it for practical applications
in their own world. Also, the dream world is viewed as a source of
many a man's mythical story origins, if I wanted to go a more
literary route with it. I'm sure there have been a lot of studies
done on this sort of thing.
Just a slew extremely broad questions I
would like to start out with are, why do we dream? What can our
dreams tell us about real life? How can we relate our dreams to our
own personal experiences, and what value do they still hold? How does
one achieve lucidity in dreams? What sort of connections can be made
between dreaming and the human imagination? How do dreams affect our
sense of spiritual awareness? I could probably go on for the rest of
the page on various questions to ask, and the topic of dreaming is an
expansive, but nonetheless, important one. But that's what makes this
topic so exciting is the fact that there are so many questions to be
asked and so many different approaches to be taken.
