  It is now a well established fact based on several observations that we live
in a Universe dominated by dark energy. The most natural candidates for dark
energy are fields in curved space-time. We develop the formalism to study the
gravitational collapse of fields given any general potential. We apply this
formalism to models of dark energy motivated by particle physics
considerations. We solve the resulting evolution equations which determine the
time evolution of field configurations as well as the dynamics of spacetime.
