Sharon Sliwinski, "An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed" (MIT Press, 2025)

Dec 18, 2025

Dr. Sharon Sliwinski, a Professor in Information and Media Studies and author of *An Alphabet for Dreamers*, explores the significance of dreams in social knowledge and healing. She discusses how dreams can serve as critical resources for understanding social conflicts and collective experiences. Sliwinski details her work with the Museum of Dreams and the transformative power of dream-sharing in fostering deep conversations. Through playful pedagogy, she emphasizes attentiveness to dreams as a key to new ways of seeing the world.

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INSIGHT

Dreams As Public Knowledge

Dreams were once central public sources of knowledge and guidance in many cultures.
Sharon Sliwinski argues modern societies have lost this communal epistemic role for dreams.

INSIGHT

Dreams Foster Curious Attention

Dreams keep personal and political struggles active while we sleep and invite curiosity.
Curiosity about dreams creates a state of inquiry that can reduce defensive responses in waking life.

ADVICE

Invite Playfulness To Discuss Dreams

Use a playful, childlike approach to discuss dreams to lower defenses and invite curiosity.
Translate visual dream images into words to create psychological distance and new meanings.

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Borrowing from the traditional alphabet book genre for children, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Sharon Sliwinski provides adult readers with a new grammar for dreams, or what neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro calls “oracles of the night.” In this book, Dr. Sliwinski restores dreaming to its proper place as an important worldmaking activity, one that offers a gateway to another way of seeing. Each of the short chapters engages a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.
Thinking alongside the dreams of powerful exemplars—from Harriet Tubman to contemporary Indigenous activist Abigail Echo-Hawk—readers come to understand how dream life is a crucial resource for generating new worlds and new ways of being. The book brings together urgent concerns from the domains of critical theory, visual culture, and mental health to show how dreaming serves as a vital source of knowledge and a critical mode of thinking.
As with traditional alphabet books, illustrations provide an integral voice. Each chapter of the book is accompanied by an original watercolor painting by Melinda Josie that visually underscores the way dreams serve as a unique medium for processing our lived experience. Together, the images and text form a delicate dialogue, drawing attention to the details of the central scenes, extending the book’s special mode of thinking in painted form.
By working alongside dreamers from the past and present, An Alphabet for Dreamers begins a new and much-needed conversation about the social and political importance of dream life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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