Pandemic Dreams

During the pandemic, filmmaker Werner Herzog, wrote The Twilight World, a novel about Hiroo Onoda's decades in a jungle after World War II. In tonight's episode, we hear how Herzog's own experience in the Amazonian jungles informs the dreamlike experience of Onoda in the Philippines. Listen.

When making his screen adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, Denis Villeneuve opened the film with a line not in the book -- but at the same time, recognizing the importance of dreams to the story.    Both the novel and film rely on dreams in the same way the great texts of world religions have. In this episode, we look at how dreams aid the storytelling of prophets and messiahs, giving glimpses of things to come. (Or in the parlance of Hollywood: sneak previews.)

More than 40 years ago, the composer Harold Budd recorded one of the first "ambient" records on Brian Eno's Obscure Records label. With the Superior Viaduct's re-release of The Pavilion of Dreams, it seemed a good time to reflect on Budd's classic album and the soundtracks that might help us enter our own Pavilion of Dreams.

Have our dreams changed during the COVID-19 pandemic? If the WHO is right and we are “sleep-deprived” how has that affected our dreams? And does changing how and how often we dream alter what we’re dreaming about? Join us for an exploration of some of the latest dream research and insights.

We follow the filmmaker Maya Deren through her dream of beaches, dinner parties, and chess in At Land.

In which we discuss the dreams of children and the dreams adults remember from childhood. Do Time and Memory change dreams?

Tonight, we have a musical interlude, taking us back to Mister Kelly’s in Chicago 1957, with Sarah Vaughan singing Johnny Mercer’s Dream.

Tonight, we consider the cuttlefish. Or more precisely, we consider research on the dreams of the cuttlefish. And dolphins.

The World Health Organization calls it a global "sleep loss epidemic." With more and more people getting less and less sleep, what happens when we dream less?

In 1960, after the success of La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini began keeping a dream journal, a practice he continued for the next 30 years. Here, we read an excerpt from the journal and revisit the opening of the great 8 1/2.