At the beginning of the twentieth century,  Freud has identified dreams as being the royal road to the unconscious: their interpretation has thus become a basic instrument of psychoanalytic work. Indeed, they say something about their dreamers’ desires and fears, about the conflicts impelling or blocking their affects and their existence. But dreams also express meaning concerning the dreamer’s surrounding community and culture, they are a cultural phenomenon not only at the level of the meaning they are given, but also at the level of their explicit manifestation. To give a striking example, there are communities whose members frequently dream the same dream. This is not the case for European Culture, where dreams, at least apparently, are related to the individual psyche.

In dreams, the soul is released from the attachments imposedto our vision of the world’s landscape by the “reality principle” and reveals an uncontrollable creative potential. Dreams have also been recognised as having a prophetic function, capable of anticipating the future, and of being a sign of destination, resulting from an urgent decision to find one’s own way. Descartes’ dream of the night of the 10th of November 1619, which produced a true conversion to philosophy for the founder of modern rationalism, makes exuberantly evident how strong excess and irrationality are in reason’s own impulse.

Organization:

Adelino Cardoso (CHAM)

Bruno Barreiros (CHAM)

José Silva (IF/UP)

Nuno Miguel Proença (CHAM)

Paulo Jesus (CFUL)

Organization