School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe act of writing: the art of dreaming & Plague Room( 2010)There are numerous accounts of creative writers claiming to write from a dream-state, but these accounts have never been examined as scientific fact and have instead, to date, been primarily accepted or dismissed as nothing more than anecdote. This paper is the result of a wide ranging survey of neuro and cognitive science as well as applied psychology, and it examines how findings in these fields support the long held contentions of the many writers who believe that the mind writing can be more similar to the mind dreaming than it is to normal waking-thought. Beginning with a connectionist account of cognition, I discuss how the same cognitive faculties necessary for thought are also found in dreaming and writing. Understanding how conceptual spaces arise from physical stimuli and how these spaces can then be built into larger units of thought enables an examination of how brain stimulation and constraint leads to varying states of consciousness as represented by a waking-dream continuum. Expanding on these basic principles, Alan Hobson’s AIM theory of dreams is then probed to show how the elements of activation, input and modulation can be tuned to move a subject between states of consciousness. Ultimately, with dreaming and writing both understood in terms of the connectionist mind, and with the knowledge of how the elements of AIM determine a subject’s current state of consciousness, I explore the methods of Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Olen Butler to show that their writing practices sufficiently alter those tunings so as to move the mind from a waking-state into a dream-state. Turning from theory to practice, the creative portion of this thesis represents my attempts to incorporate these dream-states into my writing. Borrowing the power of the jewel center from Kerouac, the freedom of automaticity from Stein and the practice of dream-storming from Butler, I used a sustained hypnogogic state to explore potential writing spaces, trying out characters and turns of plot until finally – with the intent of meditation – I began writing and redreaming the story over the many drafts that it took to get the vision to fully coalesce. The result of these endeavors is the novel Plague Room, and it is my hope that it possesses the full strength of a dream-state and that the reader finishes wondering if what they’ve experienced was real or if it was mere reverie.