The joy of human-to-human dialogue about the creative process is the heart of Pamela Cohn’s book, Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers. Cohn, whose lengthy list of nonfiction film accomplishments span writing, commentary, curation and filmmaking itself, used her own archive of filmmaker interviews, as well as new conversations, to assemble an eclectic collection of voices from across the global documentary landscape. While most of the independent artists featured may not be top-of-mind filmmakers in the industry (working largely, as Cohn notes, “in virtual obscurity”), all have achieved significant recognition for their creative work. Indeed, the interviews contained within this 280-page book reveal a deep commitment among the artists featured to expanding the nonfiction form, whether for political engagement, intimate reflection, artistic possibility or other meaningful pursuits.

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Lucid dreaming means to be aware that you are dreaming while doing so. Probably we’ve all had these kinds of dreams. Therapies have been built around lucid dreaming. Books have been written, sometimes equating it to an outer-body-experience inside the mind, and websites have popped up, including Lucidity.com. Philosophers have weighed in. As Nietzsche once said, in Human, All Too Human, “Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream one would have found no occasion for a division of the world.”

But that’s not what Pamela Cohn’s on about in Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers. Not exactly. Cohn is more interested in a parallel hyper-seeing — waking up into your life and using a camera to help you do it, producing a cinematic experience, and reframing your way of thinking along the way. The 29 filmmakers Cohn interviews come from all parts of the world — Asia, Europe and the Americas — and their filmmaking covers the usual panoply of social issues, including immigration, race, gender issues, economics, surveillance state, selfhood, and the phenomenological use of the camera. Cohn writes, “My hope is that the effect of disparate personalities gathered together in one volume evokes an expansive and global conversation, not merely a series of dialogues strung together.”

Read the interview here.