Nascent Dreams (2012) is a work for full orchestra that explores the elasticity of form as musical analogy. In a programmatic context, each thematic section can be interpreted as representing landscapes or events encountered while dreaming. Listeners are privy to the nascency of each section before the music whisks one away to the next soundscape. Musically, the work emphasizes melody and lyricism in order to establish a song-like quality throughout.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Decades before Freud revealed his revolutionary dream theory, Americans became fascinated with the reported dreams of their greatest hero, Abraham Lincoln. Immediately following Lincoln’s assassination, accounts of his dreams and visions were recorded and made public by those who were close to him during his presidency. This thesis evaluates the three most famous dreams and visions that have been ascribed to Lincoln, as their legitimacy is often doubted. Five additional dreams that are more easily documented are also discussed, and, when taken together, they reveal a significant aspect of Lincoln’s worldview and reflect the complicated nature of belief systems in America during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century Americans were largely on their own to interpret the meaning of their dreams, and they ultimately came to conclusions that were based within their fundamental worldview. This thesis shows that Lincoln’s dreams are a valuable source for determining his worldview, which was essentially a form of fatalism. While many argued that his recurring dream that preceded important events in the Civil War and a dream about his own funeral in the White House were either evidence of his belief in spiritualism or some divine prophecy, Lincoln’s response to those dreams reveals his true nature. This analysis helps us examine Lincoln’s interior as well as showing how a pre- Freudian culture responded to the dreams of a national hero.

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

No description available.

No description available.

Various characters tell the story of their participation in a series of events that take place in and around a casino, in a strange, almost magical atmosphere. The narration deals with the theme of illusion, as well as that of the danger and beauty of dreams and reality merging. / The second part of this master's thesis is a critical paper that focuses on the way in which dreams and oeniric writing unfold in the works of Milan Kundera. The method entails understanding and defining dream writing through a typology that categorizes the different types found according to their function. The varying degrees culminate when dreams and reality merge: how does the line that distinguishes the two become blurred? Can it be defined or delimited, and above all, on which thematic ground?

The study was prompted by the lack of existing research with regard to what people locally think and believe about dreams. The study aimed to uncover, explore, and describe current, local dream related beliefs, discourses, and practices (in the Vaal-Triangle area of South-Africa), using a postmodern, social constructivist, as well as a generally sociological approach. In support of this aim, a literature review of various religious, cultural, and psychological dream related discourses was executed. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with twenty respondents who were purposively selected from the administrative database of a Vaal-Triangle University on the basis of culture and gender. The interviews were recorded and the edited transcriptions thus derived served as basis for a thematic qualitative analysis of the respondents' dream related beliefs and practices. The findings were also examined with regard to cultural and gender related patterns, as well as in relation to existing dream discourses. Findings included that dreams were accorded differing degrees of importance by the respondents, that dreams were believed to originate both from internal factors such as an individual's mental and emotional state and neurological processes, as well as from external factors such as daily events and experiences, deceased relatives, and God. Furthermore, dreams were believed to serve several different functions such as mental processing, releasing pent-up emotions, expressing fears or desires, predicting the future, or providing warnings and solutions to problems. Dreams also often served as basis for decisions and actions, most often in order to avoid a negative outcome, or actualize a positive scenario shown by a dream. Several types of unusual dream experiences were reported, including precognitive dreams, dreams that provided contact with a deceased relative or ancestor, spiritual experiences in dreams, as well as sleep paralysis. The most significant sociological findings included that dreams often influence the nature and content of social interaction between individuals, frequently serving as a source of humour and entertainment; that the mother often serves as the "keeper" of knowledge about dreams, and that local dream discourses and practices might in part be transmitted matrilineally. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Sociology))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2005

In a scientific study of dream content, artificial intelligence has been utilized to automatically score dream content. An initial attempt focused on scoring for emotional tone of dream reports. The contribution of this thesis demonstrates methods by which accuracy of such a system can be improved beyond text-mining. It was hypothesized that data extraction based on psychological processes will provide significant information that would produce an accurate model. In our first article, the significance of words expressed in dream reports, along with their associated words was explored. Extraction and inclusion of these associations provided detailed information that improved automatic scoring of positive and negative affect even though these associations exhibited skewed distribution. The second article demonstrated how normalization of the data was possible and how it could result in a more accurate model. Our last article was able to demonstrate that the model can differentiate between male and female dreams.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit bi-Yerushalayim, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-312).