Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Nightmares and Creativity,” on the relationship between frightening dreams and real creative achievements, with Bernard Welt, emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University, former member of the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and contributing editor of DreamTime.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-nightmares-creativity .]

Nightmares are associated with creativity—but how, exactly? Why do so many famous accounts of genius in the arts and sciences originate with a frightening dream?

Explore such questions with the help of Bernard Welt, who has taught courses on recalling dreams and dream journaling and written extensively on the relationship between dreaming and the arts.

Using excerpts from texts, illustrations of artworks, and clips from classic films derived from nightmares, Professor Welt will look at the relationship between bad dreams and celebrated innovations and creative accomplishments.

You’ll learn why psychologists consider the nightmare to be a key to understanding the creative power of the unconscious mind. We’ll consider sleep scientists’ definitions of the nightmare, asking why it still remains controversial, and explore contemporary theories about the relationship between nightmares and creativity from psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypal theory, evolutionary psychology, and other sources.

Though dreams have special authority in many cultures, in the western world it’s only among the nineteenth-century Romantics that we began to see personal accounts of creativity inspired by dreams—curiously, preponderantly bad ones. We’ll look at how Frankenstein arose from Mary Shelley’s famous dream of a scientist confronted by his own fearful creation, and how art’s Surrealist movement taught us to value our nightmares.

You’ll learn how dreams of all kinds can result in sudden inspiration because they relax inhibitions, transcend habitual trains of thought, and permit ideas that would be rejected by the thought processes of waking life. You’ll even come to see why we may welcome our nightmares as opportunities to expand our vision and our understanding. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (public domain).

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Course of the Appalachian Trail,” on the fascinating past and uncertain future of a beloved wilderness trail and national park, with Mills Kelly, emeritus professor of history at George Mason University and author of A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-appalachian-trail .]

Spring brings people flocking back to the Appalachian Trail, which for more than 100 years has provided opportunities to spend anywhere from a few hours to six months traversing the Appalachian Mountains. Stretching more than 2,000 miles across 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, it ranks among the most iconic long-distance hiking trails in the world. It and its associated national park are annually visited by nearly 17 million.

Gear up to perhaps spend some time on the trail yourself by spending an evening with Mills Kelly, an expert on all things Appalachian Trail and is the author of two books and numerous articles on the trail’s history.

We’ll start our scholarly journey by looking at the trail’s origins. First proposed by Benton MacKaye, a forester, in 1921 as a place for urban workers to get some fresh air and sunshine, the trail took 16 years to scout, map, and carve out of the mountains. The first version was woven together mostly from abandoned mountain roads, Indigenous people's paths, and highways.

Drawing on research in archives up and down the length of the trail, Professor Mills will show us archival photographs and video clips spread across the decades of the trail’s history, and he'll let the voices of hikers themselves describe how the experience of hiking has changed over the decades. You’ll earn what hikers ate before the advent of freeze-dried backpacker meals and when and why thru-hiking became a thing. More profoundly, we’ll examine how innovations in gear changed the experiences of women on the trail, and how changing attitudes about race transformed the hiking community.

Professor Mills will describe how the trail is maintained entirely by 33 volunteer clubs. Looking ahead, he’ll discuss how the trail’s long-term health as a recreational resources is being affected by declining federal support, overuse in some sections, and climate change. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 1928 photo of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club taking a break from its work (National Park Service / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Life Hacks for Distracted Brains,” a look at how we all could benefit from research-based strategies for managing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, with Laura E. Knouse, professor of psychology at the University of Richmond, licensed clinical psychologist, and author of Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-hacks-for-distracted-brains .]

Technology has altered our environments in ways that challenge our capacity to stay focused and complete tasks. Netflix beckons us away from doing the dishes. We doom scroll instead of undertaking planned projects. In bumping up against deadlines for completing important tasks we realize that we’ve been doing just about anything else.

Fortunately, the science of psychology offers insights into what we can do to take back our attention and bridge the gap between our intentions and our actions.

Learn new strategies for staying focused with Dr. Laura Knouse, a clinical psychologist who studies ADHD in adults and is an expert in using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat it.

In a talk geared toward a general audience but sure to also benefit those with ADHD diagnoses, she’ll discuss evidence-based approaches to helping people gain new self-regulation strategies and manage thoughts and feelings that reduce motivation.

To help you become better at starting and completing meaningful tasks, she’ll teach you how to recognize and change emotional states that reduce motivation, and also how to notice and respond to sneaky thoughts that can derail task-completion efforts.

You’ll learn hacks for staying focused and the basic psychological principles that explain why they work. These include the principle of negative reinforcement and also the Premack Principle, which holds that we’ll perform a less-preferred activity for the sake of being able to perform a more-preferred one.

Audience members will have the opportunity to develop personal action plans for using these hacks to progress toward one of their important (but avoided) goals. To offer more in-depth guidance after the talk, Professor Knouse will have copies of Living Well with Adult ADHD available for sale. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Pixabay.