Laura Anne Meek

What happens when we dream? Do we enter another world or does the external world populate our dreams? What is the role of power, inequality, and subject position in shaping dream experience? Is “dreaming” a universal experience or does its very ontology shift across time and space in ways that cannot be rendered commensurate? Anthropologists have approached these questions from various analytic points of departure, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, ontology, theology, and more. Rather than create a new meta-theory of dreams, workshop participants will experiment with approaches across theoretical terrains, challenging the strict demarcation between the individual and the social, the psychic and the ontologically “real,” the literal and the symbolic, the secular and the religious. We will open the anthropology of dreaming to the immersive epistemology of dreams themselves: their forms of montage, assemblage, movement, and resonance, which resist unity or closure. Bringing together 10 scholars from diverse backgrounds, career stages, and positionalities, our meeting at UC Davis in March 2025 will employ associative techniques of writing and listening that mirror the form and practice of dreaming. Our aim is to produce a journal special issue that approaches dreams as both an object of study and a method for study.