(Creatures of imagination : on dreams and the radical imagination)

This paper is driven by the conviction that the imagination names a field that far exceeds anything able to be spoken of as a power, a faculty, or something at our disposal. The initial claim is that the imagination is, as John Sallis has argued, more akin to "the meaning of Being". But when we come to speak of the imagination, our tendency is to reduce it to being a human faculty and to think it as dependent upon the real. In an effort to open the question of the imagination more radically and to call attention to the quite peculiar relation of the imagination to original images, I address the experience of the dream as an experience of the radical imagination which is not able to be understood as a faculty, but which must be understood as larger than that which can be defined by the human