When I went to the colloquium I had been considering reaching a course on dreams in the local high school, in Guilford, to fulfill the internship requirement of the program. I decided that I would not teach a course on dreams in Guilford, but rather in the inner city, in New Haven. This teacher-run school is especially interested in interdisciplinary studies and innovative approaches to education. Meeting with the teachers, I presented my reasons for wanting to teach a course on dreams, I said that it seemed really strange that one hears almost nothing about dreams in school. We are blessed with a dialogic imagination.
Psyche loves stories.
We love to listen to stories, we tell stories to others, we tell stories to ourselves in our dreams. But we do not talk about dreams in school. There is so much we can learn from our dreams. I described four of the educational, creative, psychological, and social benefits of high school students studying dreams. By considering the images of their dreams as metaphors and imaginal expressions of their feelings and concerns, the students could move from concrete to more abstract, symbolic ways of thinking, thereby increasing their capacity to think symbolically.