Dreaming the Unstable Wings of Desire: Unseen, Educational Bruisings and The Elusive Self of Literature

Abstract

When it comes to education, the dream cannot be controlled by the strictures of language or the conscious mind, and in its insistently disobedient character, is unwilling to submit to the demands of a deliberate and conscious curriculum. Indeed, we might say that what dreams represent is the absence of education itself, and a mobile energy antithetical to a fantasy of smoothly functioning teaching. In this article, we approach the question of dreaming’s place in education through two intertwined lenses: the conceptual and the literary. First, we intersperse throughout our paper excerpts from an untitled fictional narrative about a group of students who become progressively more beaten up, and whose teacher is unable to see their bruises, as they embark on the precarious task of expressing their dreaming, creative selves. We also turn to psychoanalytic theory (and, in particular, Thomas Ogden’s theory of dream thinking) to discuss the significance of the impenetrable nature of the dream, and ask how such qualities of unrepresentability might challenge our desires for answerable questions and legible answers. We end this piece with a recognition of the ways in which shared experiences of reading and writing may also support a place for dreams.

Keywords:

• Reading experience
• psychoanalytic theory
• Thomas Ogden
• the literary self
• collaborative reading and writing
• dreaming