The Varieties of Dreaming

The conference will propose an interdisciplinary discussion on dreaming that will focus on the diverse perspectives able to provide a comprehensive understanding of what it is like to dream. Hence, medical and neurophysiological explanations of the dream experience will be accompanied by and compared with analyses coming from the research fields of psychology, psychotherapy, cognitive science, philosophy, and art. In this way, the conference aims at offering a variegated reading of the most common and mysterious phenomenon of mental life. Suggested topics:

- Connection between neurophysiology and philosophy in dealing with dream experience (with special attention to the mind-body problem, the role of the subject as both dreaming and dreamed subject, the status of consciousness, among others);

- the continuity waking state/dreaming state;

- sleep disorders, their effects on dream performance, and suggested treatments (i.e. sleep apnea, RBD, parasomnias);

- the dream and the dreamer in literature and art;

- the relationship between reality and unreality in dream experience;

- the role of dream activity in the therapeutic setting;

- dreaming and lucid dreaming;

- the meaning of dreaming in the social life of individual.