You really want to know what I'm writing? I just finished the first draft for my section on film and literature in the book proposal for Dreaming in the Classroom, which I'm co-writing with Kelly Bulkeley and Phil King (God bless 'em for getting me to actually to do something that might result in publication). I know you will find this f a s c i n a t i n g.
The photo is by Ralph Gibson.

Draft: Film and Literary Studies (BW) – 4-3-06
Literary studies of dreaming may begin with myth, folklore, and biblical criticism, and thus address the same cultural and psychological issues as the anthropology of dreaming. Folktales and religious scriptures featuring dreams set the models for later literature, from medieval dream visions to surrealist poems. The range of possible objects of study is extremely wide, and in offering some suggestions in our chapter on this topic, we try to focus on texts from different cultures and periods that are accessible, available, and perhaps most importantly, short enough to be actually read by your students.
In his introduction to The Dream Adventure (Orion, 1963), Roger Caillois identifies two main approaches to literary dreams: the psychological, which seeks an interpretation applying to the psychology of character or author (or by extension, to the group psychology of a society), and the philosophical, which uses the dream as a device to illustrate a metaphysical issue, or perhaps more properly, considers the genuine metaphysical questions raised by dreams. Contemporary classes may learn from Freudian or Jungian theories, apply the lessons of Gestalt therapy or Montague Ullman’s dream-appreciation seminars, or extend the horizon of topics from Western to Eastern literature, but the fundamental division in method remains the same. The psychological approach treats the dream as a coded message like others in the literary text to be decoded through the critic’s favored method; the philosophical approach may be more conducive to post-structuralist approaches like deconstruction, as it invites continual reconsideration of the ontological status of both the dream and the text. (Just think of Alice’s position in her underground adventures, trying to figure out whether she is actually dreaming, and the enduring appeal of the philosophical approach even to untrained readers is abundantly clear.) Both are of obvious relevance to contemporary classes in literature, especially when so many have branched out into popular culture, cultural studies, and alternative media, all of which present new contexts for dreams outside of traditional literary genres. (A third approach, which treats the literary dream as historical evidence, can add fascinating conundrums and new interest to history courses, particularly in periods when the dream vision is a prominent form as in the European Middle Ages.) Increasingly, instructors who invoke psychological theories in their teaching of literature must be prepared to offer the relevant accounts not only of depth psychology such as psychoanalysis, but also of contemporary brain science, mind-body philosophy, and cognitive psychology.

What is true of literature is, in this case, anyway, true of film, where the lessons of cognitive psychology are only beginning to be integrated into critical study. A limited number of courses on dreaming and cinema have been taught in the United States. Those initiated by psychology departments or instructors have emphasized the interpretation of dream sequences as revelation of character—as, perhaps most famously, in Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece, Wild Strawberries. But courses developed by film instructors are more likely to broaden the focus beyond the psychology of character to consider dreams in relation to the many issues raised by the genres of fantasy, children’s film, and most recently, the spate of metaphysical fantasies such as The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Waking Life that testify to an unprecedented interest in dreaming among filmmakers and the general movie audience. Nearly every specialist on film has encountered the idea of the cinema as a form of collective dreaming. The difference among instructors is primarily in how they choose to investigate this analogy. Those who adhere to a realist theory that characterizes film essentially as a means of faithfully recording the objective world will treat cinematic dreaming as an interesting special case; others may find that films featuring dreams and dreaming consistently pose provocative challenges to realism.

Clearly, the fundamental topics in which dreaming can be of special interest in courses in literature and film studies are: the unique access that dreaming offers to the study of symbols generally; the models, derived from the theories of Freud, Jung, and other psychologists (including traditional non-Western sources only now becoming familiar in the United States) for understanding how dreams express the relation of the individual to the world; the genuine metaphysical questions raised by dreaming as they appear especially in self-reflexive texts; and the endlessly fascinating question of the relation of dreaming to the roots of imagination and creativity generally.

Dreaming may be not only an object of study but homework in a class in literature, film, or any of the humanities fields. Beginning (to the best of our knowledge) with Richard M. Jones’ courses at Evergreen State College in the 1970s, as described in The Dream Poet (Schenkman, 1979), many teachers of literature have found that asking students to keep a dream journal and raise their own dreams in class fuels their imaginative impulses and fosters a subjective identification with authors and characters that results in eager, engaged and creative interpretation of literary texts. Composition and creative-writing teachers have long found that dream-based assignments not only often result in an unlabored, unself-conscious that breathes new life into student writing, but also encourage active and empathetic listening when writing is shared in class.