Waking Life
We all dream, yet many of us don’t know what to make of our nocturnal adventures.
Before the screening of Richard Linklater’s groundbreaking Waking Life, dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD, explains why we dream and what our dreams may be trying to tell us.
Dream is destiny. In 2001, writer-director Richard Linklater released a spiritual sequel to his acclaimed early features Slacker and Before Sunrise. Taking its cue from their walk-and-talk stream of consciousness, Waking Life inquired into the relationship between dreams and the big screen, and how cinema captures the fantasy state.
Aiding Linklater’s exploration were two major players: actor Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused, Computer Chess), who acts as our guide through the dreamscape, and animator Bob Sabiston, who created the appropriately disassociated, floating rotoscoped visuals. Featuring Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke (reprising their Jesse and Céline characters from Before Sunrise) and director Steven Soderbergh, Waking Life is an extraordinary thought-provoking trip, unlike anything before or since.
About the Speaker
Deirdre Barrett, PhD, is a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. She is past president of both the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the American Psychological Association's Div. 30, The Society for Psychological Hypnosis. Dr. Barrett has written five books: The Committee of Sleep (Random House, 2001), Pandemic Dreams (Oneirio Press, 2020), The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist's Couch (Random House, 1998), Waistland (Norton, 2007) and Supernormal Stimuli (Norton, 2010). She is the editor of four additional books: Trauma and Dreams (Harvard University Press, 1996), The New Science of Dreaming (Praeger/Greenwood, 2007), Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (Praeger/Greenwood, 2010), and The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams (Greenwood, 2012). Dr. Barrett has published dozens of academic articles and chapters on health, hypnosis, and dreams. She is editor-in-chief of DREAMING: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams.
Dr. Barrett's commentary on psychological issues has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Fox, and The Discovery Channel. She has been interviewed for dream articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Life, Time, and Newsweek. Her own articles have appeared in Psychology Today and Invention and Technology. Dr. Barrett has lectured at Esalen, the Smithsonian, and at universities around the world.
