Dream as a Source

We invite you to a lecture by Bohdan Shumylovych on dreams as sources, which will take place as part of the public program "Source as Choice".

Often considered private and ephemeral, dreams have long been recorded in stories, sacred texts, diaries, chronicles, cultural texts, and psychoanalytic studies. Experts in fields ranging from cultural history to psychohistory have explored how dreams reflect collective anxieties, social transformations, and changes in historical consciousness.  So can they also serve as sources? 

During the lecture, we will look at dreams as historical artifacts, discuss their role from antiquity to modernity, their interpretation across different disciplines and methodologies, and their significance for memory studies. We will follow in the footsteps of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Reinhart Koselleck, who have considered dreams as "windows" into the mental and cultural landscapes of the past, talked about their special temporality, and asked important questions: what is history?

Previous

Next

The event will be part of the Center's public program "Source as a Choice," organized by the Center for Urban History. During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.

Credits

Cover Image: Image taken from "The Half Hour Library of Travel, Nature and Science for young readers", p. 51 / 1896 / British Library

Gallery: Olya Klumyk