New Perspectives in Dreaming

In recent years there has been an upsurge of philosophical interest in dreams. Inter alia, there have been several monographs at least partially focused on dreams (e.g. Flannagan 2000, O’Shaughnessy 2000, Revonsuo 2009, Thompson 2015, Windt 2015), a substantial number of articles on the ontology of dreams (e.g. Ichikawa 2009, Rosen 2021, Soteriou 2020, Whiteley 2020, Windt and Metzinger 2007, Windt 2010), fresh approaches to epistemological dream scepticism (e.g. Ichikawa 2008, Sosa 2005, Soteriou 2020), and a growing interest in the ethics of dreaming (e.g. Cowan 2022, Driver 2007, Smuts 2016). Much of this philosophical work has been influenced by psychological and neuroscientific work on dreaming, including large edited collections on the science of dreaming (Barrett and McNamara eds 2007) and the neuroscience of dreaming (McNamara 2022), articles on the contents of dreaming (Domhoff 2019, McNamara et al 2007), the function of dreaming (e.g. Revonsuo et al 2016, Valli et al 2005), the waking effects of dreaming (e.g. Schredl et al 2007, Selterman et al 2014), lucid dreaming (Stumbrys et al 2014, Voss and Hobson 2015), dream neurophysiology (Solms 2011, Hobson 2009) and the relation of dreaming to other sleep states (Thompson, 2015; Windt et al., 2016; Alcaraz-Sanchez 2021).

In light of these developments, the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience (CSPE) is convening a conference on New Perspectives on Dreaming on the 3rd-4th of July 2023. The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the exchange of new perspectives on dreaming, with a view to fostering collaborations, and advancing our understanding of dreams along a host of interconnected dimensions: ontological, epistemological, ethical, functional, psychological, and neurophysiological. We will do this by bringing together some of the philosophers and psychologists who have contributed to recent developments in dream research, as well as dream researchers who are new to the field.

The two-day conference will be a hybrid event, thus enabling the widest possible group of researchers to participate. There will be ten presentations in total. Six of these will be delivered by invited speakers (details below) who have been selected in light of their contributions to the recent upsurge of interest in dreaming, as well as their work spanning a wide range of subareas within dream research. The remaining four contributors will be selected via blind-peer review from submitted abstracts.