“What I learned in Dreams 101” – The
Student Perspective
Gillian Finocan, MA, is a
doctoral student in clinical psychology at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio. Her master’s thesis focused on women’s experiences
using different dreamwork methods. She is currently working
towards her dissertation which will be a qualitative study on
healing dreams and the role of dreams in recovery.
Roger Knudson, PhD, is
Director of Clinical Training in the PhD program in clinical
psychology at Miami University and a member of the IASD Board of
Directors. He has taught courses on dreams for over 25 years at
Miami. His published work on dreams has focused on "significant"
dreams from the perspective of archetypal psychology.
Abstract
College courses on dreams are
usually described from the professor’s point of view. Discussions
focus on readings used, the nature of the assignments, methods of
assessment, and so on. Rarely is the student perspective
considered. We will briefly describe an undergraduate senior
seminar on dreams. We then will present the results of a series of
interviews we conducted with students who had completed the
seminar, focused on what students regarded as the most important
things they had learned in the course. Their responses went far
beyond a discussion of intellectual mastery of theories and data.
Instead, they emphasize the often intense and deeply personal
nature of these lessons. From personal insight to creative
inspiration to spiritual awakenings, the undergraduate course on
dreams is revealed to be a powerful catalyst for dramatic lessons.
In an attempt to do justice to these responses, we present a
series of “performance texts.”
“Performance texts” are among the new forms of research
dissemination that seek to engage the audience at an emotional
level. In contrast to the descriptive mode of categorical
analysis, such texts attempt to be faithful to the depth and
detail of human meaning making. We will briefly discuss the
methodological considerations involved in constructing such
texts.
References
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the text. In J. VanManen (Ed.), Representation in ethnography (pp.
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Researchers as storytellers: Writing on the edge—And without a
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