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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Dream Interpretation,” with Richard Bargdill, associate professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, teacher of courses on dream interpretation and the psychology of creativity, and author of the newly released book A Dreamer’s Thought Book: Intriguing Ideas about the Dreaming Process.
Get ready for the talk of your dreams.
Learn about dreams and techniques for making sense of them from Professor Richard Bargdill, a psychologist whose research focuses on how we create and find meaning.
He’ll walk us through the influential ideas regarding dreams and their meaning put forward by major figures in the field of psychology, such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. You’ll become familiar with Freud’s criteria for regarding a dream as significant and Jung’s dream theory and its focus on anima/animus, persona, archetypes, the shadow, and the collective unconscious.
From there, Professor Bargdill will discuss his own dream theories and interpretation techniques developed over 30 years of recording his dreams. He’ll talk about how the highly visual messages of dreams can be interpreted by putting the images into language.
You’ll learn how dreams can be messages or warnings to yourself and how we create our own artwork in dreams that feature music, visual pieces, or ideas that we wrongly attribute to other people. You’ll learn how repetitive dreams can represent an effort to get a message across until it’s finally received, or what various animals that pop up in dreams are trying to tell you, or how certain characters from the past can haunt our dreams until we make peace with them or at least understand why they keep coming back.
No dream has only one meaning, but often a challenging dream is attempting to say something to the dreamer. You’ll emerge from the talk knowing new techniques for figuring out what that message is. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: “The Knight’s Dream,” painted by Antonio de Pereda in 1655 (Wikimedia Commons)
