The Curious World of Dreams and How to Study It

Have you ever dreamt that you lost your teeth? That you were flying? Or suddenly ran into your high school crush while naked? The landscape of dreams can feel strange and intensely personal, yet certain motifs, symbols, and questions about dreaming appear again and again across cultures and time. What are dreams, and how do we study them?

This panel brings together researchers from anthropology, neuroscience, and dream studies to explore how different disciplines approach the phenomenon of dreaming. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen Morten Axel Pedersen, whose work explores dreaming, imagination, and cosmology across cultures, joins Ginevra Sperandio, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience whose research investigates perception, cognition, and the neural mechanisms underlying our experience of the world. They are joined by Adriënne Heijnen, PhD researcher at Aarhus University whose work examines dream sharing practices in Iceland and how dreams circulate within communities. The conversation will be moderated by researcher and lecturer Sebastian Scott Engen.