The Hidden Self
w Manisha Anjali
2-4 PM, Kathleen Syme Library and Community Centre, 16 October 2026
In 13th century Japan, the Buddhist monk Myōe Shōnin kept a dream diary where he recorded dreaming of a dove who changed into froth, the octopus-shaped soul of the priest Shōgi who crawled into a house, and numerous spiritual teachings from deities. A collection of urgent, ephemeral, half-remembered, haphazardly translated fragments, the dream notebook is revealed as a wayward, enigmatic archive of the hidden self. Such a notebook sits at the intersection of poetry and documentary, bearing witness to the near past, shifting terrains, collapsing worlds, as well as proliferating new metaphors, chimeric images, and frameworks for experimentation.
This hybrid seminar-workshop investigates the symbolic and poetic weight of dreams recorded by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, Buddhist monk Myōe Shōnin, poet and theorist Jackie Wang. Through creative-critical examinations of selected dream texts, we investigate how dream residue, fragmented images and emotional traces create meaning and possibility. How can a dream fragment resist the narratives that yield the everyday? What is revealed in the urgency of dream recording? Is a dream fragment a poem? By engaging selected dreams in writing experiments, we pull from our own imaginal realms to craft new writing.
Participants are encouraged to bring a written dream.
Readings:
Cixous, Hélène and Bie Brahic, Beverley. “Forewarnings”. Dream I Tell You, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 1-11.
Tanabe, George. “The Dream Diary of Myōe Shōnin.” Myōe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in Kamakura Buddhism, Harvard University Asia Center, 1992, pp. 159–98.
Wang, Jackie. “Death as a Survival Technique.” The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, Nightboat Books, 2021.
Manisha Anjali is a poet and artist. She is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024), which was listed for the Stella Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry, and others. She is the recipient of The Peter Steele Award for Poetry in 2026. Manisha facilitates the School of Dreams, a program on dream observation, esoteric reading and imaginative writing. She is one-half of Whelk, an ambient music and poetry collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Genevieve Fry. Manisha is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.