Boyda J. Johnstone

The book project “Falling Awake” takes on a veritable explosion of interest in dreaming in the late Middle Ages, both amongst laypeople and the prominent literary milieu. Similar to the modern era, when intersecting political and environmental crises send people searching for new and alternative outlets—conspiracy theories, cults, astrology, and the occult are all highly popular currently—in the medieval period, dreams helped people believe they had some sense of agency and control, and offered them a vehicle for building a different, if imagined, world. Aided by my residency at the Newberry Library, this project examines medieval manuscripts containing dream interpretation treatises as well as literary dream visions that proliferated during this time to argue for the potency of dreaming as a form of both resistance and possibility. Additionally, the research will examine how the medieval dream vision influenced revolutionary writers in later centuries to push for different ways of envisioning the world as it is and the world as it could be.