Pedagogies of Panic: Teaching, Dreaming, and Writing

What we dream about – like William Blake’s lost ant, or my recent dream where I emailed some vampires to ‘enquire about the vampires’ – and how we dream is a response to the technological and social systems we’re tangled in; structures as forms. Too, as another W.B. wrote, our systems are also responses to our dreams (Benjamin). If this is the case, how do we figurate the frenzied, harmful dreaming currently at work in the British university system? I’m sorry to say I can’t answer that while I’m deep inside it, but I can talk about an instance of reciprocity between dreaming and the university that I forged myself, namely an attempt to re-dream the institution by bringing dreaming directly into its processes.


Eight years ago I designed a 3rd year Creative Writing BA degree module called ‘Dreaming and Writing’. It was a 10-week practical exploration of the discursively theorised relationship between what we do when we’re dreaming and what we do when we’re writing. The module revelled in the great artistic and literary works that interact with the mystical, political and poetic culture of dreams, with classes designed to be playfully interdisciplinary. The classic Creative Writing Workshop model expanded to include mini lectures, collaborative projects and experimental exercises: Freudian Slip Club, Dream Show Host, Condensation Games, Make a Movie from my Nightmare Challenge, Invent a Symbol, Archetype Whist, and so on. My promised Learning Outcomes included engagement with a variety of different genres, art forms, and theories. It was a foundation for introspection as well as connected critical thinking. My premise was that each student would acquire new, personal methods for writing and for questioning the principles of Creative Writing, as an academic discipline. What is fiction when sprung from a dream? Or a diary? A dream diary that breeds fiction; what form of literariness is that? Is dream-script a language that can only be poetic? There were questions for me too: the extent to which a dream was the social world revealed, explored; the self laid bare, abstracted and rendered. How was the subject radically reproduced from a dream version of the institution, and how could the dream be re-understood as pedagogy?


The module took over my life, quickly getting oversubscribed (understaffed departments with uncapped class sizes means lecturers often have to teach the same class again, and again – like a recurring dream!). It required a lot of risk too, of asking myself Is this ok?’A lot of the students asking me, Does this make sense? and, Is it okay if it doesn’t make sense? We discussed what the ‘making’ of ‘sense’ is and can be in writing (You’re writers, you get to construct sense). Running this module changed my relationship to teaching – and to writing, and also to dreaming. The shift partly came from the intensity of teaching it through lockdown, on Zoom, to online classrooms of mentally hyperventilating insomniacs (me), when everything felt hallucinatory and terrifying, and – in tune with the government’s reckless and lethal handling of a deadly virus for the protection of profit – the nightmare distortion of the university’s material infrastructure and ideological superstructure really kicked in. Unionised university staff paused their long running industrial dispute and worked harder than was emotionally or physically wise to shepherd students through their degrees. We strained our eyeballs into laptop screens and gesticulated so damn hard to transmit the ideas that had once felt like the natural outcome of simply being in a room discussing a text. Everyone I worked with gradually got glasses and back braces, some form of medication. Like many of my students – but not like many of my colleagues, however – I moved in with my mother. No one could sleep, but people dreamed a lot. The reality of being at work and the reality of not being at work dissolved. I lost a bit of faith. Not, I want to stress, because the students were anything other than brilliant; this period of teaching gave me some of the best student work I’ve ever read. 


After the pandemic, I stopped teaching Dreaming and Writing, but I didn’t stop thinking about how all three of those practices work together.

~ 

There’s a lot of dreaming about leaving HE altogether going around, not to mention lots of voluntary and involuntary redundancies, course closures amidst the ongoing, multifaceted Conservative Party attacks on the Arts and Humanities that ideologically oppose the basic concept of training young people to be creative and critical. We’re having to imagine alternatives at the same time as working extra hours to protect our livelihoods, protect our working conditions/student learning conditions, and the sector we believe in. The combination of speculation, plotting and dreaming with the materials to hand is what my module was about and what many of us are doing with the union. So (with Paulo Freire sitting optimistically on my bookshelf) I continue to believe in the project of HE and that within my discipline, notwithstanding bad faith commercial promises of things like agents and literary awards, lies a world of potential for critical pedagogy. 


In the white heat crisis-point of Higher Education, the dream and idea of state-funded arts education is nearly entirely and so insultingly destroyed. With that being so, the residual memory of a Dreaming syllabus, and conversations I had with students in the module’s four-year run between 2016 and 2022, sit in me like dreams that urgently need interpreting. (n.b. when I teach dreams I am generally against interpretation). Since then my academic job has changed (horribly!). Our responsibilities as lecturers are becoming more tied to student data than to students, more about metrics than the unconscious, and more about *marketing consultancy voice* experience, than education. Or at least one has to fight exhaustingly hard for it not to be completely obliterated by the dangerous idiocy of league table logic thusly. 


The teacher, the writer, and the dreaming subject that I am, wants to examine all these opposing dimensions together: the selves and their Shadows; the contemporary student subject and their valorised data set; in the deep, and see what critique – or hope – for the academy there is. As Orpheus said to Eurydice, are you with me?

~ 

I’ll begin with a run-through of the module itself, beginning with its foundational idea, taken from a short essay by Maurice Blanchot called ‘Dreaming, Writing’, which is an eloquent piece on the shared spirit of dreaming and writing, with a focused and devoted look at Surrealist writer Michel Leiris’s hybrid waking/dreaming journal, Night and Day (a work of pure liminality if you’re looking for one). In the essay Blanchot neatly delineates the compelling speech-paradox of describing a dream: 

The one who dreams turns away from the one who sleeps; the dreamer is not the sleeper: sometimes dreaming that he is not dreaming and therefore that he is not sleeping… In the dream, who is dreaming? Who is the ‘I’ of the dream? Who is the person to whom one attributes this ‘I’, admitting that there is one?

The module's opening invitation therefore is that a dream is a means to complicate one’s self, and that recounting a dream from this complication is the point at which we become writers, where poetry and fiction become form. It's so simple and so mind blowing; when we say, In the dream I was flying – who is this person flying, and therefore come to think of it (and the point is we do come to think of it), who is the I in the bed if I was flying? Thinking this way may loosen singularity in expression, to loosen sense, and recreate it as writing. From Blanchot we know nothing splits open the tyranny of I like a dream. I is not (3 slides of Claude Cahun self-portraits later…) a fixed descriptor: it’s all new knowledge. 


We begin writing in this module from a place that is other to I. And when we dream, we are writers. Another starting point for the module, and key to the ethos, is that the dream is a possession of the dreamer, but one that has to be lost in order to become material for everyone. This feels uncomfortable to begin with, but we need to learn the means to de-privatise the text without depersonalising it – this is the aim of writing – and the dream, as a strange item of ownership that comes from within and outside of us to be uniquely shared, is an ideal medium to rehearse this act. Discussing dreams together is a mode of allegorising both personal experience and narrative technique. It is a way into storytelling. Firstly, sharing a dream requires putting yourself at stake in the story and its telling. And in the telling there is, importantly, a political process of diagnosis; one that situates where and when and how you are, your positionality within wider structures and your relation to them. With our personal dreams out on display we are raw subjects becoming writers. From this point of dream-sharing we re-view the world, its monsters and angels. We read writers who do this – from Piers Ploughman to Jackie Wang – who reveal that in the dream there is the Subject and State, always. There is no dream, as there is no nature (ask Aristotle), without the architecture of society.

~ 

Dream factory/ dreams as factories

What is our collective nightmare? I asked my students all the time. They were resistant to the idea of a collective nightmare until we got to Carl Jung’s collective unconscious which they loved too much and for which I saw Walter Benjamin’s theory of publicly-dreamt fabrications (such as The Arcades Project) as an antidote. We did find compatible ideas of collectivity and dreaming in Helen Cixous’s self-assessment of her dreams’ monsters, formed from her childhood experience of Nazi-occupied France, which she calls ‘the dream factory’, from which all of her subsequent dreams have been created. (There is a link between trauma and manufacture in dreams that we have to address, I say to myself while teaching but not knowing how, now more than ever.)


While the ‘Dreaming and Writing’ module guide pointed to the ideals of expression and invention, what I would argue we are also learning, when writing with dreaming, is to actively recover the labour of dreams and recuperate it as creative production. Where childhood is a nursery for the psyche, something to recover and recover from every night, the writer-dreamer has to work with and against themselves. To analyse your dreams politically doesn’t exactly unburden you of this, rather we realise as writers that society is the traumatised subject, and we are dealing with its past in architecture and cinema and poetry etc. I teach that writing is freedom but/and, as we go on we are to realise that social memory is a writer’s fate.


What does it mean to perform this kind of thinking in a university? I can invite and situate a critique of the academy's fabric by way of the reading list, but I am also part of it, as a worker but also as a teacher, a role that comes with its own psychosocial baggage. Not that that’s a sensible entry point into Sigmund Freud. Freud offers a very practical form of assistance when combining the arts of dreaming and writing. In the module we study Freud’s notion of ‘Dream-Work’ in relation to writing and craft, craft being the labourish side of writing poetry that, by way of its material contact with the world through applied knowledge and effort, agitates new structures of thought and feeling that makes possible refreshed, and therefore generative, metaphors. (She says.) Simply, Freud’s system of dream-work is very much like the process of composing a poem. Dream-work is the process by which ‘Id’ material (that is, the repressed, libidinal, unprocessed, traumatic, stuff that lurks, in Freud’s diagram, below the Ego, which in turn lingers below the Superego) is translated into a dream plot (dreams as we experience them) using residual memories of the dreamer’s day to absorb repressed memories for them to then become encrypted as dream images. I find the description of it in Interpretation of Dreams as beautiful as old textbook descriptions of photosynthesis, but it also makes me feel quite tired. 


When in class my students and I likened this process to craft and composition, observing Freud’s dictum on the potency of motifs (that symbols are only meaningful in the dreamer’s relationship to them), we hit what I maintain is a moment of freedom in writing: there is no inherent value in any image; its context and resonance is what makes it, and being the wilful manoeuvrers of them is what makes us good writers. Sweet liberation! ...but this is the point I want to make: in the class we (all of us) operate multiple adjacent forms of work. We become dreamworkers of various kinds. We are students of dreams who produce dreams for study, makers of the material and content for the creative work we have to do. We are also involved in the complex system of the university, participating in its structures, financially and emotionally. We are all working for the man. (...de-oppress me from content.)


Dream-work is like poetry but it is also like the unconsciousness of a system – an unknowing, ongoing labour – in that the system has systemic ends while its actors believe they are pursuing individual goals. And this is also the conflict of teaching, dreaming and writing in the academy. The instruction is to make work with dreams, then the work of the dream is recuperated into the work of the institution, it is (was) my wage work to instigate dream-work (it’s kinda perverse). Yet as dreamers we are all doing private work on the side, work that does not cooperate with the institution. I find solace in this. However, the instruction coming from the lecturer to students to transgress in writing, complicatedly brings students into the institution. The experiment – much of this module is an experiment in experimental writing’s role in critical pedagogy – is to find the limits of this ‘problem’. A possible answer is this: the point is to not explore the dream as much as to workshop the experience of wakefulness, to recollectively grasp experience from dreams. This is why I recommend so much Kafka to the students, incidentally. 


So as I teach I am asking; What is experience and what resources do we have to make it mean something? If the answer is none, then we still have dreams. Experience can be recollected, not as something present – that’s an event in itself to sit with – but as symbolic guide to the system. It means we are part of something that extends out of us. We are not enclosed, in good and bad ways, and in terms of both the factory (our dreams) and the factory (our work).

~

I pause here to share an extract from my ‘post-teaching Dreaming and Writing’ journal:

Thoughts after Dreaming Class

• Dreaming feels preposterous – so does being awake.

• Security of the knowing subject – the dream-self indicates what it does and doesn’t feel like to know your situation. Does the knowledge of your local reality lead to security? Does an unsureness about what is happening to you and how you got there create an insecurity? Does clear knowledge of your reality create insecurity too?

• Wakefulness is not an absolute state.

• The student is a commuter (long distances).

• The student is a very early riser.

• The student is a worker. They dream about their work.

• Is this the pedagogy? To create the affects of insecurity of given reality?

• Is the movement from literary effects to reality affects a craft or a technique of citizenry?

• Student can’t come to class because of no accommodation – sleeping on sofas, can’t sleep.

• A dream has somatic gears, we perform work gestures in sleep.

• My student has a dream of juggling plates of fried steak in TGI Fridays.

• What level of skill and proficiency do we have at work in dreams?

• My embarrassment for them of me is a teaching tool.

• René Ménil on how to be imaginative – why do I want this for them? It’s in the learning outcome: to be more imaginative.

• My student dreamed that he ran away from his father in the middle of the night to check the bus timetable across the road wearing only a towel.

• The feeling of ‘had it happened’? is what happened – is anyone with me?

• The autonomy of the storyteller in relation to events is an ethical work-in-progress.

• There is an inconsistency between event and feeling – we write that.
  

I wrote this journal after teaching for the same reason people keep a dream journal, in order to capture ethereal ideas in the making, to witness a thought forming out of abstraction, to recognise and cherish student creativity in a space that wasn’t marking.

~

Here is a more formulated note on dreams and fiction:

One of the primary literary texts of class is a short story by Jamaica Kincaid, ‘What I Have Been Doing Lately’. It is a first-person narrative, someone waking up in bed to answer the door, going downstairs, seeing there is no one there, then entering a dream world of rivers, wells, throwing stones at monkeys, and coming across a wandering figure that resembles her mother but isn’t her mother. Time stretches in moments, the world’s climate is reimagined. It’s a marvellous self-animating story structured around a loop, creating an almost futile narrative arch while playing out the dreamer’s searches for images. The word ‘dream’ is never mentioned but when we read it together, students quickly cross-examine the story’s craft with their experience of recounting dreams. We note that it is always a struggle/effort to tell your story. We conclude that self expression is hard work  – it never feels rightly done – you have to repeat and reiterate, try again, life’s atmosphere alters between attempts, so the story metamorphs. When describing dreams it can feel like we are working against legibility, working against identification, against events as already understood. Kincaid’s form of experimentalism gives this strange psychology of the literary self what was needed a technique. 


The ‘I’ of story has many things to do, and to do again, she (the protagonist) also has fantastical ways out of doing things, and of getting over obstacles. There is often an administrative bent to the surreality, like the air that ‘tastes of government school ink’. Routine, however odd, becomes rhythm, structure and order. The exhausting redoing of images, with sentences hooped back in and added to, leads to accumulation and layers. The power of a typical protagonist from a more conventionally structured story, say, is here dreamily layered with extra-agency, that gets curved into contradiction.

As I fell I began to see that I didn’t like the way falling made me feel. Falling made me feel sick and I missed all the people I had loved. I said, I don’t want to fall anymore, and I reversed myself. I was standing again on the edge of the deep hole. I looked at the deep hole and I said, You can close up now, and it did.

‘What I Have Been Doing Lately’ is full of comedic shifts that also divert how the story works. We find joke-wisdom (by which I mean both the wisdom of jokes and a parody of wisdoms) and aphorisms in dreams – ‘Looking at the horizon, I made a joke for myself: I said, “The earth has thin lips.”’ The voice of the story is laced with this kind of political knowing-unknowing, and a deadpan that doesn’t boast its newly invented logic.


There is a useful starting point in Kincaid’s short story, a starting point for me and my students of the Creative Writing module, and for any conclusions I want to draw about pedagogy from its aftermath: we share dreams to explore ourselves (‘yourself’), we write with them to find an ethical position in statements, rehearsing a space of articulation and its inversion. When we write we are dealing in meaning and the redemption of meaning, but not restoring it. Writing produces what I call a Narcissus Coordinate – a self that we start from as a false paradigm. We construct one for each other and see that writing about one’s dream taps into something other than truth. It’s dirty work but some self has to do it.

~

‘the bulge and promise of a dream’

What do we know about dreams? I might ask the class. And after years of asking and thinking I’ve decided that dreams are identity protrusions. They are what lies at the heart of distorted paranoias and motives. They are innuendo apparatus, nodding towards the truth in text-heavy shrouds. My investment in them is guilty of institutional complicity and all its extractive practices. 


The module’s Reading List (see below) also states that Sylvia Plath’s short story, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is essential. And I stand by that. What better text to simultaneously consider what this essay also considers: the life of a writer in an institution, strategies of Creative Writing, the history of psychoanalysis, and the role of work in the dream-life of a subject? Plath’s story is told from the perspective of an Assistant Secretary at the Adult Psychiatric Clinic (presumably a young woman), lorded over by the omnipotent perhaps real, perhaps fantasised, folkloric God-like Freud-like character, Johnny Panic. Myth and a CEO. The Assistant Secretary’s role is to transcribe and log patients’ dreams, as well as their contextualising life-info, including their occupation and ‘troubles’. She immediately confesses to an aim that supersedes this basic task; she is collecting and memorising every dream in the system, not – significantly – for their value as clinical artefacts, but for the pure fact of the dreams themselves. She has, through an inverted relationship to her job, become obsessed with dreams, and her obsession with dreams then feeds her approach to work-task operations.


Plath’s character has her own dream: it is recounted as a kind of centrepiece, an über-dream within her collection of dreams that stands for a universal dream act overall. Her dream depicts a vast dark lake that she views from what ‘must be’ a glass bottomed helicopter,* within which a cluster of giant dragons swim around in a kind of primordial soup made of human matter, ancient tissues, hieroglyphic objects, and arcane flotsam. This ‘bog of madness’ is easily deciphered as some sort of collective unconscious, the sewer works from which emanates the principle driving force of all society, and, according to Plath’s protagonist, the principal driving force of all society is panic. As she describes, panic is the cause and the reason people get up in the morning, a poetic-cypher for Orwellian and Foucauldian fear-driven self-surveillance, panic is why we go to work, why we behave, the Super Ego that is our managers, the police, the priest, the father. We can all, on any given work day or during a waged-hour observe the stress-induced seepage between work and dream space that is well described in Plath’s story as a kind of excessive and persistent panic. Panic is what we are held open and stuck together with.


Speaking of sticky sub-substances, the story of Johnny Panic is thick with Plath’s visceral and glistening, noun-heavy, hyphenated vocabulary, written as if an unconscious dough of prose has set within it, to represent not only the imagery but the tussle between description and imaginative will. They frustrate each other and – as in all writing but in Plath’s more than any – new speech-forms get sculpted. As Jacqueline Rose says of Plath, her writing shows the division of the conscious and the unconscious as necessary for writing itself; Plath presents us with the division, the split ‘internal to language, the difference of writing from itself’. Plath’s wider writing on clinicalised young women is often in relation to blue-collar, mid 20th cent feminised work; there is always this dynamic in her writing. Her art circles around the ‘paraliterary labour of typing’ (Jernigan), secretarial work as gendered labour, as a literary craft. Compiling a Bible of Dreams is as much a job as it is transgression from her job. (I’m trying to identify more with the protagonist in denial, perhaps that I might appear in some people's dreams as Johnny Panic. We all do sometimes.)


The story ends with the Assistant Secretary’s transgressions in the dream archive being discovered. An ensuing hunt for her ends in her being drugged and bound for what we might imagine is a lobotomising procedure, twisted into something sacrificial. Thus the team (who are having their own power struggles) regain the stolen company property and transfer their internal power struggles onto punishment of her. Johnny Panic appears at the end, as both a man and a cosmic beast. In the story Plath gives us a psychoanalytic model of a job: a closed environment where modulations of control, to use a Deleuzian term, order time and bodies. Task-based existence leads to deformities of attention. (See, or don’t, but feel it everyday anyway: Lacan’s observation of how subjectivity fades at work). Plath’s dream-secretary personifies something of the bureaucratisation of the self and its effect on the unconscious. Her quiet rescue of people’s dreams, which she describes as her ‘art’, mimics the crisis of professionalisation in writing (the administrative forms of which many experimental writers from Kafka to avant-garde erasure poets mimic in order to either recuperate agency, or burn after reading). Plath's story is a satirical take on the extraordinary currency of individualised experience, the value of which is used to put the frighteners on everyone; the secretary notes that people dream of machinery and motifs of engineering.


The clinic’s curative mission seems distorted from care to something more like a cult, but also like a business. In analogous terms, we are reminded of the university (ha ha), where the distorting qualities of corporation-logic, and the maddening effect on those working or studying within it, wreck and make-monstrous its principle aims of research and education. Activities which, when made profitable, become ludicrous. The university becomes a site of panic; a wobbly colossal and comic machine trying to do competitive things, trying to monetise an experience that, when transposed onto the student as writer, causes stress – not to mention a dysfunctional relationship with themselves and their writing. 


We all feel that we are in the afterlife of the university. It’s now a sort of dream space in itself where free-floating forms of control and market configurations modulate into slogans that are then used to attack and dismantle further the dignity of Higher Education. What have I done by making the dream complexly part of that equation? The Surrealist formulation that Dream = Freedom somewhat goes awry. 

~ 

‘Who pays the cost of the idea’ (LaBarge)

I’ll finish with (and probably be finished by) the infrastructure of the university. A basic fact of the university is that in a classroom (virtual or physical) there are people. They all – the lecturer among them – have people-like troubles and selfhoods, like debt, love-lives, fatigue, loneliness, deadlines, tenancies, contracts, social media pings, visas. They have bodies, clothes, appetites, ideas, distractions. An educator of Creative Writing is versed in encouraging students to ‘write with’ these pressures and intelligences, to do as Rose says of Plath, mobilise the splitting of language from itself and narrate the fold.


What’s painful is that the lecturer, i.e. me, has also been conditioned (compelled) by post-2012 university management to view the student more in terms of abstracted data than anything else. Metrics of ‘satisfaction’, ‘continuation’ and ‘outcomes’ delineate a student as such, a sort of customer-outline filled in with costings of labour-time, facilities and other values. One student, in other words, a person, becomes 10% of a category that needs improving up or down. This is of course a dynamic that’s hyper-related to their economic value via their fees, and related status of either ‘home’ or ‘overseas’. The shady dualisms, therefore, that we have been imagining through writing and dreaming – the I of the Other Night and the I of the sleeper, the energies of the worker and the imaginative somnambulist, the languages of the conscious and symbolism of the unconscious – have a much more absurd model in the student and their market double. 


Directed, as we are, to teach this metadata-double of the real-life student, to manoeuvre and motivate the numerical topology of the student population, to bag the money, fix the stats, make the rankings, we have perhaps a version of dreaming, no, a terrible, distorted version of dream-work: to 'fix' the dreamer and to create a resonant object from residual material. I honestly think they’d order lecturers to Wear more blue clothes!’ if a conspiracy of students said they liked it when the teachers wore blue in some module feedback. This mode of diagnostic teaching, by which I mean teaching directed from a diagnosis of the data feels like the death of education. As an aside, we don’t need to be psychologists to realise that the constant extracting of feedback, constantly asking someone if they’re all right, in NSS, UKES, PTES, mid-module feedback forms, end of module feedback forms  – will eventually make someone feel very weird and paranoid, while giving them quite a distorted experience of their own levels of satisfaction. 


We, the academy, sell – something that became starkly clear in lockdown and the apparent short changing of this sale – experience. Defined by the OfS as ‘The student experience encompasses all aspects of student life, i.e. academic, social, welfare’. The student-as-customer is owed experience. This is not something academic staff can easily control, but are responsible for. There is a link here with writing. One of the bromides in some of the early 00s critiques of Creative Writing degree courses, which seem to have curled up and gladly died, is that you cannot ‘teach’ writing, writing can only come from experience, or, the sad little truism, you need experience to write. ‘Experience’ in this 00s rhetoric does not allude to the quantifiable commodity that universities peddle, but to the dirt and shame of lived-life as knowledge, like travelling somewhere exotic or marrying some arsehole, in a roughly Kantian understanding, experience converted into thought can become an idea. Well, I think to myself while teaching, I’m 42 and I’m just sitting in this classroom too. My experience is mostly dream-script at this point, as the teacher who wants to write, who has to perform data, who wonders what this all means. And if the role of teaching is to just extract experience from text to convert into content, transformed into grades and satisfaction points, well who is ever not going to be oppressed by that? The real experience is the concrete reality of the system falling apart. The economic abuse and the ideological vandalism of our sector – and students are best placed to write that. And I still believe dreaming is a tool to help do that. (I see student protest camps and occupations of university property to protest institutional links to the military-industrial complex, and to resist local and global neoliberal assaults on higher education as an excellent example of this.)


Teaching writing with dreams tells me there is a ‘good version’ of this superstructural nightmare: putting an abstracted (metaphoric, poetic, ‘image-based’) version of your experience and knowledge into a symbolic exchange with your material reality for the sake of study. So where the abstraction of experience is delineated through and through in terms of market values, and study is nearly impossible, teaching is alienating, education is poorer, students are disenfranchised through and through, then there is a chaosmosis (Guattari) alternative already here, the shape, timescale and roleplay of a BA degree, the compound co-production of a subjectivity being anxiety and fatigue, the dreams being on an equal scale to reality, the writing being extraordinary. Both structures have borders that staff and students are part of. A re-sequencing of reality is possible. Blanchot again, ‘The dream is a place of similitude, an environment saturated by resemblances’. There is something like this, which is nothing like this. 

*Note the naive and resourceful logic of the dreamer to account for their perspective.

~ 

Writing and Dreaming Reading List

Benjamin, Walter. ‘Dream Kitsch’, in The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Dreaming, Writing’ in Friendship. Stanford University Press, 1997.

Cixous, Hélène. Dream I Tell You. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control.’ October, Vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7.

​​Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin, 1985.

Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Indiana University Press, 1995.

Jernigan, Adam T. ‘Paraliterary Labors in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar: Typists, Teachers, and the Pink-Collar Subtext.’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 60 No. 1, 2014, pp. 1-27.

Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. Pan Macmillan, 2022.

LaBarge, Emily, ‘Sylvia Plath’, in The Bodies That Remain. (ed by Emmy Beber). Punctum Books, 2018. 

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 1999.

Ménil, René. various essays in, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso Books, 1996.

Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: and Other Prose Writings. Faber & Faber, 2001.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993.

Wang, Jackie. The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void. Nightboat Books, 2021.

Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with original dramatic work on BBC Radio 4, and collaborations with Women’s Art Library, and Wellcome Collection. Her poetry has been published extensively, appearing in Poetry Review, The White Review, Poetry London. Her fiction has been published in Granta and anthologised in Protest (Comma Press, 2018). Comic Timing, her Forward Prize-nominated first full collection of poetry, was published by Granta, 2021. Her first novel, The Lodgers, was published with Granta in February 2024. She currently lives in Colchester, Essex. 

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