BOARD NOMINEES: TIME TO VOTE

The 2013 IASD Nominating Committee has invited the following seven members to run for the five three-year board positions that will be vacated as of the June board meeting: Susannah Benson (Australia), Laurel Clark (USA), Claude Desloges (Canada), Janet Garrett (Spain), Diane Greig (USA), Ryan Hurd (USA), and Ed Kellogg (USA). Electees (those five with the highest number of votes) will be announced at the General Membership Meeting at the Virginia Beach conference on Sunday, June 23, 2013.

The Nominating Committee members worked long and hard to arrive at a slate of board nominees who were interested and available, and reflected gender and geographical diversity as well as a wide range of skills and knowledge. To cast your vote please visit 2013 Time to Vote

The Committee also arrived at a slate of Executive officer nominees for 2013-2014, which is as follows: Robert Gongloff, Board Chair; Katja Valli, President; Susannah Benson, Vice-President (pending election); Laurel Clark, Secretary (pending election), and David L. Kahn, Treasurer. The slate of officer nominees will be adopted by the Board, and all officers and new board members will assume their positions at the board meeting to be held on Wednesday, June 26, 2013.

PSIBERDREAMING 2013 PROPOSAL DEADLINE ANNOUNCED

Many psychologists and philosophers view dreams as a metaphorical mirror of the ego, psyche, soul, or some otherwise hidden aspect of oneself. Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass has his character Alice step through a dream into an alternate reality, where, among other challenges, she's told that she only exists as a character in the Red King's dream.

People have a variety of fascinating experiences when dreaming of looking into a mirror and lucid dreamers often experiment with mirrors in dreams. What do we learn about ourselves in the looking glass of dreams and how do they serve as a portal into possibilities hitherto undreamed?

IASD's twelfth PsiberDreaming Conference, "Through the Looking Glass of Dreams" will be held from September 26 to October 7, 2013.

Proposals for papers or workshops for presentation at PsiberDreaming 2013 must be submitted by June 26, 2013. A maximum of twenty-four presentations can be accepted for this two-week online annual conference. Presentations will be accepted based on relevance to the conference topic, "Through the Looking Glass of Dreams," with specific focus on psi or "extraordinary" dreams. For further information, please visit PsiberDreaming 2013

IT'S NOT TOO EARLY TO THINK ABOUT JUNE ADVERTISING!

Highlight your presence at the 2013 IASD Conference by advertising in the annual conference program.

The annual conference program is handed out to every attendee at the IASD Conference and contains key information on events, schedule of sessions, workshops, and much more. Attendees constantly refer to the program onsite and hold onto it for future reference, generating multiple impressions for advertisers. Not all conference attendees are IASD members, so advertising in the conference program increases your exposure.

IASD Member Discount

Do you have a product or business to promote? Do you host a dream group? Are you an artist who would like to reach out to an international audience? Do you offer ongoing workshops? IASD currently boasts more than 90 published authors among its members. Was your ad included? If not, don’t get left out again this year. You can provide us with camera-ready artwork or, for a nominal fee, we will create your ad for you using one of several specially designed templates.

Special Virginia Beach Section

There will be a special section reserved to promote Virginia Beach services, restaurants, and businesses. If you are a business within a 25 mile radius of the conference site, your ad will be placed in this special VA BEACH section.
For rate sheet, ad specs, and payment options, please visit: Buy A Conference Program Ad  

Materials deadline is May 10, 2013.

Discounted prices are available for IASD members.

MEMBERSHIP NEWS

Wojciech Owczarski, a new IASD member who established the Research Unit for Dream, Memory and Imagination Studies at Gdansk University, talks about dreams, research and his upcoming presentation at the IASD annual conference in June.

From IASD Member, Wojciech Owczarski, Gdansk, Poland

For almost twenty years, I have taught the history of Polish literature at the University of Gdańsk. My research interests also include cultural anthropology and theatre studies. Just as I try to look at life from as many viewpoints as possible, in my academic work I also aim to combine different fields and perspectives. The common denominator of my interests is the phenomenon of imagination, or to be more specific, the healing activity of phantasms.

For this reason, I began to pay increasing attention to dreams, as after all, it is in dreams that imagination seems to reach the heights of its therapeutic potential. Thus, I study dreams in an interdisciplinary manner: in literature, the arts, culture, social life, and at the meeting points of all these areas. I am currently finishing a book on dreams in Polish literature and culture. Suffering an acute lack of time, I tend to neglect my own dreams.

Two years ago, I was established at the University of Gdańsk Research Unit for Dream, Memory and Imagination Studies, where my colleagues and I investigated the mysteries of dreams. We are steadily joined by new graduate students and Ph.D. candidates with whom we try to implant the idea of dream studies, which remains a merely budding discipline in Poland. The projects carried out in our Research Unit concern mainly the cultural and social aspects of dreams.

In 2011, my colleagues from the Research Unit with Dr. Monika Żółkoś won a research grant funded annually by the IASD and Dream Science Foundation. Our project was entitled “Therapeutic Effects of the Dreams of Nursing Home Residents.” The research results will be presented at the IASD conference in Virginia Beach in June.

Thank you, Wojciech Owczarski, and congratulations on the IASD research grant award. READERS NOTE: There is a call for papers for "Dreams, Phantasms and Memories" Interdisciplinary Conference which will be held at the University of Gdansk, Poland, September 19-20, 2013. All details are available on the Dreams, Phantasms and Memories website.

An addendum to last month’s Membership News about dreams and children: an article by Jennifer Parker, K. Freer and Kate Adams will soon appear in the International Journal of Dream Research entitled “Characters, Social Interactions, Emotions and Self-Representation in 7-8 and 9-11 Year Olds’ Dream Reports.” Also in regard to children/family dreaming, on April 27 Valley Reed is facilitating a Family Dream Journey Workshop in Fairview, Texas. For more information, please contact Valley

The Membership News about collective dreaming still continues with this month’s Dream Network Journal, published by Roberta Ossana and guest edited by Jean Campbell. The publication will feature articles by many IASD members related to group/cultural and collective dreaming. Don’t miss it!

If you are interested in contributing to the Membership News, please contact Diane Greig

Be sure to join our Facebook group page. We have 676 friends. In addition, let your Facebook friends know about IASD’s fan page (with 1,516 Likes - up 60 from last month), and its website. Also, check out IASD’s new page on Google+.

From Membership Chair,
Diane E. Greig, Ph.D.

From Susan Benson, Regional Chair

Congratulations to Claude Desloges and the Montreal conference committee who report that the one-day Montreal regional conference has attracted 300 registrations. The third Colloque Régional de Montréal will be held April 13, 2013 at De Maisonneuve College. This event, which is held in French, keeps growing in strength. Bravo!

There’s still time to take advantage of the April 22, 2013 deadline for early bird registration for the Massachusetts regional conference, The Creative Power of Dreams. Keynote speakers are Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep and Ernest Hartmann, author of The Nature and Functions of Dreaming.

News from Massimo Schinco
(Regional Representative, Italy)

THE STREETS OF DREAMING DAY COMES AGAIN!

After the huge success of the first event in 2012, the initiative “The Streets of Dreaming” is taking place again in Italy! In the medieval town of Costigliole Saluzzo (at the foot of the Alps) in the Piedmont School, children and the elderly and everyone in between are building dream catchers that will be displayed on the streets. On June 4, 2013, with the help of musicians, storytellers and peddlers, citizens will then participate in a big collective waking dream. The spirit and theme is the same as last year: “Dreaming is the first step to concrete changes.” Massimo Schinco will be part of the jury of the International Dream Catchers Contest that will be held for the occasion. (Winning dream catchers and the names of their creators will be displayed for one year in the streets.) The initiative fully reflects the IASD spirit and receives IASD’s support.

 Regulations of the contest and general information will be published at Le Vie Dei Sogni

THE CYBERNETICS OF MY DREAMS: A NEW STUDY GROUP ONLINE

“The Cybernetics of my Dreams”, is a new online study group created by Massimo Schinco in January, 2013. Its purpose is to probe the integration between a unique approach to systemic psychotherapy called “The Milan Approach©” and dream work. Massimo is co-director of the Milan Centre of Family Therapy in Italy where this approach was developed more than thirty years ago by Luigi Boscolo, MD and the late Gianfranco Cecchin, and has since been taught and spread worldwide.

Following the visit and lecture of Ernest Hartmann in April 2012, Massimo and the faculty of the Institute started to investigate how to improve ways of working with dreams in their school, and how to widen the scope of “The Milan Approach©” in a consistent theoretical framework. The focus of the group is to take advantage of the inestimable contributions that dreams convey to the therapeutic relationship and to the healing process.

The group is now setting its own pace (before posting and discussing, people have to study!) and due to the highly specific goals and theoretical reference points, access to the group is restricted to faculty, students and alumni of the Milan Centre. The group is sponsored by IASD and participants must accept IASD ethical statements, which perfectly overlap with the ideas of mutual respect that the Milan Centre consider fundamental in its school and clinical practice.

Regional Event Calendar 2013

New England Regional Conference “The Creative Power of Dreams” takes place on May 25, 2013 at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts.
Host: Curtiss Hoffman

For millennia, creative people in all cultures have relied upon their dreams for inspiration. Come and celebrate the creative power of dreams at this one-day IASD regional conference! Keynote speakers are Deirdre Barrett, the author of The Committee of Sleep, and Ernest Hartmann, the author of The Nature and Functions of Dreaming. In addition, there will be a performance of excerpts from Curtiss Hoffman’s Gilgamesh Cantata, based on dream texts from C.G. Jung’s Red Book and using musical themes derived from dreams. Additional speakers will present papers on various aspects of dreaming and creativity.

Registration will be $68 for IASD members, $78 for non-members, and $48 for students and those with limited incomes. This fee includes registration and a catered lunch.

Contact: Curtiss Hoffman at teximus@comcast.net or for more information check out New England Regional.  

Contact: Curtiss Hoffman

COLLOQUE REVE III, MONTREAL REGIONAL CONFERENCE
AND MONTRÉAL’S ‘DREAM BOULEVARD’

Gouin Boulevard, in Montreal, meanders along Rivière-des-Prairies in the northern part of Montréal Island. Interestingly, the three major institutions related to dreams and dreamwork in Québec are located on Gouin Boulevard. “Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur” that harbours the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory is located at 5400 west; “Centre L’Arc-en-ciel” is located at 39b west; while “L’école internationale de rêves Nicole Gratton” stands at 3375 east.

Coincidence? Synchronicity? Or could it be that the spirit of Island Woman, the atetshents (shaman-dreamers), that instructed Robert Moss (Dreamways of the Iroquois. Destiny Books. 2005) in her log cabin “somewhere in the vicinity of Montreal,” still lingers along the shores of Rivière-des-Prairies, a major waterway of the First Nation Peoples?

The third Colloque Régional de Montréal will be held on April 13, 2013 at De Maisonneuve College. This IASD Eastern Canada Region Conference will be a one-day event held in French.

The Colloque will feature world renowned Jungian psychoanalyst and author, Guy Corneau, and Tore Nielsen, professor at the Department of Psychiatry of Montréal University and Director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory. Ten other presenters, including six IASD members, will unfold various aspects of dreaming, dreams and dreamwork. The short presentations, directed at both the initiate and non-initiate, will illustrate how to tap the inexhaustible source of dreams to enrich one’s waking life and improve “well-being”.

The aim of the Montréal Regionals is threefold: 1° Sensitize the general public, Mr. and Ms. Toutlemonde, to dreams and their potential, 2° Make known the professional and material resources related to dreams and dreamwork in the region, 3° Promote IASD, its mission and activities.

The Colloque is organized by a committee composed of: Claude Desloges (Centre L’Arc-en-ciel), Yves Dubuc, Angela Dupont, Nicole Gratton (École internationale de Rêves) and Monique Séguin.