The University of Dreams
The arrival of your dreams...
The dream archive will soon be open.
The University of Dreams is a creative project, born out of the Essex Futures programme.
It called upon all members of the University of Essex, from each campus, and from every
area of work, study and play, to share their dreams. The project caught everyone’s imagination
and in a two week period in February over 120 dreams were submitted.
These dreams are now available for browsing by members of the University of Essex through the
password-protected 'dreams narrative' link on the right (accessed with your university log-in).
You will be able to surf the dreams of the community and read commentaries on the dream material
and the nature of public dreaming from academics based at Essex.
University of Dreams – Talk and exhibition opening
Tuesday 3 May – 6pm to 8pm
Lecture Theatre Building Foyer and LTB2
We invite you to attend the opening of an exhibition which offers a window onto the dream-life
of the University. Excerpts from the submitted dreams will be displayed alongside photographs,
CCTV footage and sound recordings of the Colchester Campus at night-time.
Novelist Iain Sinclair and Professor Marina Warner will give talks and be in conversation
about the power of dreams and the creative process.
Poets Jeremy Reed and Ralph Hawkins will use the dream project as inspiration for poetry
readings.
Programme
6pm to 6.30pm: Drinks reception and opportunity to browse the exhibition
6.30pm to 8pm: Talks by Marina Warner and Iain Sinclair and discussion of dreaming, accompanied
by poetry readings
RSVP
Attendance is free but places are limited. Please e-mail dreams@essex.ac.uk to reserve your
place. Places will be issued on a first-come, first-served basis.
Event participants
Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her publications include
novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairytales. She teaches
in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and is
current President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). Recent works include
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Stranger
Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (forthcoming).
Iain Sinclair is a British novelist, poet and film-maker, with a particular interest in
mapping mythic and psychic geographies of place. According to John Lanchester, ‘there is no more
interesting writer at work in English’. His works include Downriver (Grafton, 1991), London
Orbital (Granta, 2002), Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's ‘Journey Out Of Essex’
(Hamish Hamilton, 2005), The Firewall: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Etruscan, 2006) and Hackney,
That Rose-Red Empire (Hamish Hamilton, 2009).
Jeremy Reed is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his
generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’, and described by J. G.
Ballard as ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth’. A postgraduate of Essex University,
his more than two dozen books of poetry include his Selected Poems (Penguin, 1987), Red-Haired
Android (Grafton, 1992), Saint Billie (Enitharmon, 2001) and This Is How You Disappear: A Book of
Elegies (Enitharmon, 2007).
Ralph Hawkins has been writing poetry since the late 1970s when he was one of a number
of radical poets gathered at the University of Essex. He now lives on the Essex coast at
Brightlingsea. His many publications include Tell Me No More and Tell Me (Grosseteste 1981),
At Last Away (Galloping Dog Press 1988), The Coiling Dragon... (Equipage, 1999), and Gone to
Marzipan (Shearsman, 2009).
This project is run by the 'dream team'.