Dream has been the subject, as it is well known, of studies belonging to many different disciplinary fields, from the history of esoteric cultures to psychoanalysis. In the field of literary studies, in the past years many books and articles have been published, from a classic texts such as L'ame romantique et le reve by Albert Beguin to numerous essays on the presence of dream in the Bible or in classical texts, ancient and modern. In a bibliography that is at the same time huge and irreducible to a few simple references, however, we still lack general theoretic studies of the modalities of the "dream retold" (with the only exception of the very recent Conter le reves by Jean Daniel Gollut); as well as we still lack a "history of dream" such as that of which Walter Benjamin lamented the absence and invoked would be done. One of the objectives of this research would exactly be that of collecting systematically and with a precise methodology all the examples of dream retold in a corpus of texts which should be vast but also clearly circumscribed.
The Bolognese research group seems to be particularly competent for addressing in a systematic way the chosen subject of study. It includes a number of well-known specialists, such as Mario Lavagetto, who has written on Freud and has in a number of occasion studied the narrative mechanisms of dream, Vittorio Roda and Remo Ceserani, who have both written extensively on the fantastic in literature, and a strong group of young and less young researchers (of which many have written on Italian, English, French, and German fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries), who have all declared their interest in the subject and their willingness to work on it in a systematic and organised way. Among these possible collaborators there is also a group that is specialised in the electronic treatment of literary texts, has a remarkable experience in this field (with such enterprises as the publication of the electronic journal "Bollettino '900", the organisation of seminars and workshops for Italian and foreign researchers, the preparation of sophisticated data bases).

The main objective of the research is to analyse the dream as narrative micro-text in the European novel from 1890 to 1930. These two dates might seem at first rather arbitrary, yet they are consistent with a thesis that lays at the core of the project: in those forty years the form of the novel has undergone a series of radical and traumatic modifications and Nineteenth-century fiction, its fundamental structures and procedures have been completely remodelled: characters have lost their marks of identity and fate; time has disintegrated; the thread of the story (the "famous red thread" of which Musil spoke and which allowed the novelist to say with self-assurance "before that" or "after that") had vanished ans was no longer re-traceable. A great novelist like Thomas Hardy, who wrote his last novel in 1896, speaking with Virginia Woolf thirty years later, would say: "We used to think that there was a beginning, a centre, and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory". The break up of this theory, or of what remained of it, determines a modification of the narrative protocols, which involves also the way in which dreams had a place in the narrative universe. While up to that moment the context in which the various dreams were inserted (it is enough to think at Don Rodrigo's dream in the Promessi sposi) was assigned an interpretative function, to start with the end of the Nineteenth-Century the connections between micro and macro-text are much weakened, become problematic, and the world of dreams very often assumes the character of an irresolvable enigma. To quote an image that can be found in the Interpretation of dreams (1899) we could say that to literary dreams, similar in this to the real dreams studied by Freud, is appended an "umbilical cord, an obscure and unfathomable point which connects them with the unkwon (Unbekanntes)". To bring to light such modifications it will be necessary to proceed to a systematic and large-scale scanning of novels and tales that were published in the period of time under scrutiny, to classify situations, describe characters, construct typologies, distinguish between real dreams and open eyes dreams, identify and classify those that are usually called "threshold marks", define thematic and stylistic constants and variables.
Specific task of the Bologna research group will be that of preparing models for scanning, cataloguing and interpreting dreams inserted in literary texts between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth centuries, of collecting all the proposals and suggestions coming from the other research groups (both from those dedicated to the study of dreams in the tradition, from the Renaissance, to Romanticism to modernity, and from those dedicated to specific sections and national traditions within the parallel period of the most mature modernity). The group will proceede to the identification and definition of the common characters and of the specific ones of literary dream, after the full manifestations of the new epistemological and narrative structures of modernity., A special task of the Bolognese research group will be that of preparing the second phase of the project: the real and systematic classification of the dreams collected, in which all the local research groups will be engaged in strict co-operation. The research group specifically formed for the electronic study of literary texts will have the task of preparing the instruments for the electronic classification, working on a number of sample texts. This group has been in touch with other specialised groups, such as the CNUCE one from Pisa or the on from Turin directed by Mario Ricciardi, that is specialised in thematic researches and in electronic catalogues of literary texts. Professor Ricciardi and his group have already declared their interest in officially becoming part of the general network of this research, starting with the second year and the beginning of the second phase, when all the local groups will be ready to move toward the electronic classification of dreams in literary texts.

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