Elliot R. Wolfson

Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His main area of scholarly research is the history of Jewish mysticism but he has brought to bear on that field training in philosophy, literary criticism, feminist theory, postmodern hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of religion. He is the author of many essays and books including Though a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994), which won the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Category of Historical Studies, 1995 and the National Jewish Book Award for Excellence in Scholarship, 1995; Along the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Hermeneutics, Myth, and Symbolism (1995); Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (1995); Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy (2000); Language, Eros, and Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (2005), which won the National Jewish Book Award for Excellence in Scholarship, 2006; Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (2006); Venturing Beyond—Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (2006); Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009); and A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011). Wolfson has also published two collections of poetry: Pathwings: Poetic-Philosophic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language (2004), and Footdreams and Treetales: 92 Poems (2007).

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream - In a nutshell

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream grapples with the allusive and elusive place dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, I set out to illustrate that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing; that the sensory world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream in which one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, I articulate how a productive paradox emerges to reveal the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.

Editor: Erind Pajo
December 19, 2011

Elliot R. Wolfson A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination Zone Books576 pages, 6 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches ISBN 978 1935408147

Support this awesome media project

We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!