Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Framework

Dreams have been fascinating multiple disciplines for centuries, from philosophy and literature to contemporary cognitive science. Why we dream remains an enduring mystery, but cognitive research on dream has experienced a new wave of interest in recent years. Breakthroughs in the experimental study of dreaming are provoking multiple questions about the experiential qualities of dreams and the potential insights they might disclose for larger issues such as consciousness, the self, and our relationship with reality. How does our enactive and cognitive experience of reality permeate into dreams, and vice-versa? What makes dreams immersive and world-like experiences?? And are dreams narrative experiences, or experiences that we only later narrativize?

Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition answers these questions with an interdisciplinary framework encompassing not just the psychological sciences but the full breadth of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Driven by the interdisciplinary project, Threshold Worlds, based at Durham University in the autumn of 2020, this volume combines multiple methodologies to chart a more systematic landscape of dream-worlds. This includes co-constructing exploratory models, experimental designs, and phenomenological enquiries, as well as the collaborative interpretation of existing data from dream reports. It covers the themes of narrativity, permeability, immersivity, and reportability through original and interdisciplinary contributions from cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, narrative theorists, philosophers of mind, theologians, and artists.

Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of this work are available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. These parts of the work are free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Marco Bernini is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies at Durham University's English Studies Department. His research focuses on narrative theory and cognitive science for the interdisciplinary study of consciousness, self, and imagination across a variety of media, cognitive processes, and mental states. He also worked on applying the extended mind view to creative writing and authorial intentionality, and on a narrative approach to cognitive theories of complexity and emergence. He has recently established and leads the 'Narrative and Cognition Lab' at Durham University and is the author of Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models and Exploratory Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Ben Alderson-Day is a Professor of Psychology and the Co-Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University. He completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2012 before working on Hearing the Voice at Durham University for over 10 years. He is the co-founder of the Early Career Hallucinations Research group and the Scientific Chair of the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development.