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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Sharon Sliwinski, "An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed" (MIT Press, 2025)
Description: 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 âoracles of the night.â 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 recordâfrom both the recent and distant pastâto show how these experiences can help make sense of p...