Chris Pike: The Detective, the Shulamite and the Garden of Dreams

The connection between dreaming, language and myth, including the role of what we currently think of as ‘wordplay’ (puns, anagrams, riddles, figures of speech, etc) in dream imagery and dream interpretation, has been recognised and used by various cultures for thousands of years for purposes of prediction, guidance, self-understanding and/or communication with the Divine. This talk aims to throw light on the mythological (archetypal) origins of language and its role in dreaming through charting the presenter’s discovery of multiple layers of wordplay in a dream he experienced several years ago. This led him on a journey of self-exploration and research from the study of a painting by Paul Klee to the ancient Hebrew poetry of the Song of Songs. The talk outlines the unfolding interpretation and ‘decoding’ of the dream-riddle in dialogue with the presenter’s waking life, subsequent dreams, and research, and shows how the original dream encrypts, anticipates, describes and provokes the process of its own interpretation by - and transformative effect upon - the dreamer.

Dr Chris Pike is a Principal Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Psychology, Politics and Sociology. Before joining Canterbury Christ Church University, he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kent. While originally a developmental psychologist focussing on the role of adult-child conversation in children’s cognitive development, he now has wider, more transdisciplinary interests in the areas of psychology and art, language and communication, and psychology, religion and spirituality. He is currently integrating these interests via studying the phenomenology of dreams and dream interpretation.