Dream and World

Editors: Katherine Swancutt and Charles Stewart

Call for Papers

We are seeking contributions for a special issue on the theme of ‘Dream and World’ to be submitted to a leading Anthropology journal. ‘Dream’ and ‘world’ are understood here in their broadest sense. We welcome analytically innovative and ethnographically rich contributions focusing on how dreams create worlds, and vice-versa.

The précis (below) provides more details on the special issue topic. Prospective contributors might also like to consult Katherine Swancutt’s overview in the Annual Review of Anthropology ‘Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes’.

As a first step, please get in touch with one or both of us to express interest. Our timeline calls for submission of a draft giving a good idea of your materials and approach by 30 June 2026 and receipt of the final draft by 15 September 2026. Contributions should be no more than 7,000 words in total, inclusive of everything––title, abstract, keywords, main text, endnotes, references, acknowledgements, and author biographies.

We aim to submit this collection for publication by the end of 2026.

Katherine Swancutt: swancutt@eu.cas.cz

Charles Stewart: c.stewart@ucl.ac.uk

Précis

Anthropology has long approached dreams and dreaming as everyday experiences filled with worldmaking potential. Freud considered that many night dreams worked over the ‘remains of the day’, thereby continuing the everyday world of the dreamer. Such dreams of ‘this world’ are no less worldmaking than other dreams that dramatize a departure into other universes, or the reception of otherworldly beings as visitors. We especially welcome contributions that consider cosmological visions in dreams or in states such as lucid dreaming, daydreaming, or hypnagogia in which people may see or sense forces revealing a world beyond. Experiences such as these may prompt people to orientate toward a ‘dream life’, a scalar concept that encompasses everything from the prosaic (living in a dream house or embarking on a dream holiday) to the deeply abstract (entering a new cosmological world through initiation, conversion, or even death). Chinese ‘dream-wishes’ (mengxiang 梦想) may potentially evoke everything from a 'dream career’ (such as being a rock star) to a ‘dreamt-for path in life’ (such as following the fundamental principle, or Dao 道, that underlies all existence). Some dreams may ground wisdom, as in the Australian Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’, offer a foretaste of euphoria as in dreams of a blessed next world, or descend into a nightmare as in dreams of extraterrestrial attacks on the self or environment.

We seek papers for this special issue that address how people dream worlds into being––worlds that in turn push dreamers to reflect not only on their own existence but on the very act of worldmaking itself. Just as our research partners may ask themselves (and us) what counts as a ‘dream’ or a ‘world’ in the first place, so the contributors to this volume are asked to give voice to the predicaments of ‘worlding’ through richly textured ethnographic analyses. We welcome papers that explore the multiplicity of ways in which dreams and worlds create, shape, shade into, overlap with, unsettle, topple, disassemble, dissolve into, or potentially even sublimate each other. Anthropology, which is arguably a very particular kind of dreamscape, creates its own predicaments of existence that invite analysis. Ethnographies of the anthropologist’s dreams in the field, which sometimes include using local forms of dream interpretation, may evidence anthropology’s dreamlike qualities. By the same token, the shared experiences of anthropologists and their interlocutors may manifest as (actual or metaphorical) dreams which sow the seeds for unique anthropological visions, concepts, and analyses that operate as worlds unto themselves. Some of our research partners may have their own views on what anthropology is and set out to shape it in a particular way, through a kind of ‘reverse anthropology’ that foregrounds their ‘ethnographic dreams’, and their dream lives. Because some of life’s greatest predicaments are addressed through the making of a dream and/or world, we encourage contributions that rethink the interface between them.