Imaginative Awakenings: Dream Writing in South Korea

 

While much of the work produced in creative writing courses in the academy appears to focus on and arise from waking life experience, imagery and perception, this paper attempts to demonstrate, through reflection on several years of teaching dream writing at the university level in South Korea, the myriad possibilities of dreams as a rich and vibrant source of material for literary and artistic production.

Students tap into this source through keeping a daily dream journal, presenting, discussing, and revising dream works on a weekly basis. The often striking imagery, emotion and uncommon logic of dream works makes them optimal templates for instruction on clarity of expression, concision and originality—lessons which may be applied in all fields of writing, creative and expository. While examining the dream works of authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, students also experiment with rendering dream material in multiple forms and genres.

With forays into the work of Patricia Garfield and Stanley Krippner, exploration of various types of dreams, including lucid, precognitive, prodromic and taemong (Korean birth dreams), leads us to the therapeutic qualities of dream writing, and how the recording, self-analysis of and reflection upon our dreams can occasion healing, growth and the reconstruction of personal mythology.