Project collects dreams of uni staff and students (From Gazette)

Project collects dreams of Essex uni staff and students

9:00am Thursday 10th March 2011 in Woman By Neil D'Arcy-Jones

SIGMUND Freud claimed dreams represent wishes you don’t want to share with anyone, even with yourself.

But the University of Essex is bucking that theory as a team of staff and academics based at the three campuses in Colchester, Southend and Loughton have been gathering the dreams of staff and students. The entire community of Essex University were encouraged to upload, and share their dreams on-line, with the aim of creating a dream database that will be available in the summer.

These were done anonymously and with details of any real-life individuals within those dreams kept secret.

Angela Treagust, head of finance for commercial services, is one of the team of six involved in the University of Dreams project.

She says: “It was something completely out of my comfort zone, but also incredibly interesting.

“It’s really caught the imagination of the university community. We’ve had more than 100 submissions and already there are a number of common themes coming through.

“Those include exams or the preparation of them and the changing environment, which is interesting for me because of the re-development going on at the university over the last couple of years.”

Others include travel and flying, possibly linked to the wide variety of nationalities that now study at the university.

Following the collation of the dreams, the team’s task is now to present them as an archive for future generations.

Academics from various fields, artists and creative writers will also use the dreams as inspiration for commentaries and responses, and there will be various linked events. These include an exhibition of photographs and images emerging from the dream project, plus a launch event on May 3 featuring writers Marina Warner and Iain Sinclair.

The University of Dreams is part of the Essex Futures Programme, an opportunity for academic staff to discover and explore how they might contribute to shaping the future of the university.

As well as Angela, the University of Dreams team includes sociologists Roisin Ryan-Flood and Michael Halewood, head of corporate marketing Claire Lindsay, lawyer Penny Brearey-Horne and Matt Ffytche from the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies.

Angela adds: “The idea of the project is to give an insight into the dream life of the university and already we are discovering there is a lot more coming out of it than we had first imagined.”

For more information, go to www.essex.ac.uk/dreams