Dreams and Inward Journeys

Book excerpt: This best-selling collection of readings explores the theme of dreams, the imagination, and the heart connected to the reasoning mind. Supporting a creative approach to the teaching of writing, Dreams and Inward Journeys presents a rich mixture of reflective essays, stories, and poems. Thematically focused on dream-related topics, the readings chapters discuss such topics as memory, myths/fairy tales, obsessions, sexuality, gender roles, the other, technology, popular culture, nature, and spirituality. Readings move from the personal to the abstract, encouraging students to investigate new ways of seeing and understanding themselves and their relationship to fundamental social issues and universal human concerns. Featuring a dual thematic and rhetorical organization, each chapter also provides practical writing advice on a specific rhetorical pattern, strategies for writing, critical thinking questions, and two to three student sample papers. Beautiful, stimulating art opens each chapter to support the theme and provide prompts for prewriting.