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From Freud to film: What do dreams really tell us?
Our dreams, our movies, and "Inception'
AJ Sabatini
Christopher Nolan's newly released movie, Inception, dwells and soars into the familiar filmic territory of dreams— or, rather, it relates a story that coils in and around dreams and dreaming, dreams within dreams, dreams about dreams, dreams dreaming dreams"“ and, incidentally, some sinister events that involve greed, guilt and grimaces by Leonardo DiCaprio.
The quasi-thriller plot concerning the implanting of dreams and ideas unsurprisingly turn outs to be less important than Nolan's amazing technological feats, proving, as many films do, that what appeals to the eyes and plays with the brain doesn't necessarily satisfy the mind.
In any case, the subject of dreaming, and films with dreams, continue to fascinate us, mainly because dreams, like language, are at once common, immediate and identifiable yet, in the end, unexplainable. Part of the mystery of dreams is simply that while they occur in the brain as electrochemical processes during periods of sleep, they nevertheless seem to be meaningful.
But do they contain meaning? Are they thoughts? Ideas from the unconscious? Symbolic messages? Instructions? Wishes? Repressed desires? Personal animations? No one can convincingly say.
Two new inventions
It's always worth remembering that films and dreams and the mind— or, more precisely, the modern mind— were invented around the same time. That is, the technology for showing moving pictures developed in France and America through the late 1880s and 1890s, but didn't really become popular as either a functional medium for representing information or for entertainment purposes until the 1900s. As for dreams and the mechanisms of the mind, in 1900 Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams established that it was possible to think of dreams and dreaming as not only understandable but significant.
Freud also provided, in his early writings, an accessible (though rough) notion of the human mind. For him, the mind was divided into conscious and unconscious realms, to which Freud offered plausible interpretive schematics for recognizing how recurrent images and patterns, in everyday life as well as in dreams, often betray unsayable desires.
Keep forgetting the keys to your office, Freud pointed out in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and maybe you don't really want to go there. Keep dreaming of a young, wet Leonardo DiCaprio— well, they did call James Cameron, the director of Titanic, to help out with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Collective dreaming in a theater
By the 1920s, the movies became an influential force in (Western) cultural history, and audiences were"“ consciously and unconsciously"“ involved in forms of collective dreaming. You don't have to be Freudian to realize how motherly and seductive it is (or used to be) to slouch in a comfy seat in a dark space, sucking passively on a soda straw, or smoking (as was permitted until the 1970s) while your eyes are fixed on pleasurable images and stories with happy endings.
On another level, dreams as wish fulfillment and nightmares describes German film of the period, starting with the infamous Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). There were also the surrealists, like Man Ray and Luis BuÓ±uel, who attempted to represent dreams on screen. Their efforts introduced the kind of imagery and dreamlike narratives that films, TV and cool websites employ today.
Fast forward: dream/films range from Hitchcock's Spellbound, Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World, and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep— to name a few. And, it's not for nothing that, eventually, notions like "dream machine," "dream factory" and "dreamworks" became attached to the movie business.
And now, dream websites
Meanwhile, in fields as varied as anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and neurologically based dream/sleep research and sleep science, dreams have been mightily studied. These days, websites are devoted to dream research, dream science and dream and sleep therapy, with hundreds of variations on the subject.
But for all the investigations of dreams, and for all the accumulated testimony and data, there is little that is completely, conclusively, scientifically, authoritatively definite about dreams and dreaming, or what dreams might mean to an individual. In fact, even though electronic neural imaging scanners can record activity and (purportedly) actual images in areas of the dreaming brain, the meaning or significance of an image is up for grabs.
Where's the evidence?
Think about it: if I dream of Jeannie or you dream of Jennie, no one but ourselves can say that we do. There might be "evidence" that something has happened in our dreaming brain, but unless we choose to verify what we've dreamt, it remains a figment, a thoroughly subjective phenomenon. (As for the girl in question, check out another terrific dream film, William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie , from 1948).
Films like Inception develop from the premise that others can determine what we might dream. It's a frightening thought because, in the end, as Freud and others suggested, dreaming might be a way of talking to ourselves about ourselves. And who would want that conversation interrupted?
The quasi-thriller plot concerning the implanting of dreams and ideas unsurprisingly turn outs to be less important than Nolan's amazing technological feats, proving, as many films do, that what appeals to the eyes and plays with the brain doesn't necessarily satisfy the mind.
In any case, the subject of dreaming, and films with dreams, continue to fascinate us, mainly because dreams, like language, are at once common, immediate and identifiable yet, in the end, unexplainable. Part of the mystery of dreams is simply that while they occur in the brain as electrochemical processes during periods of sleep, they nevertheless seem to be meaningful.
But do they contain meaning? Are they thoughts? Ideas from the unconscious? Symbolic messages? Instructions? Wishes? Repressed desires? Personal animations? No one can convincingly say.
Two new inventions
It's always worth remembering that films and dreams and the mind— or, more precisely, the modern mind— were invented around the same time. That is, the technology for showing moving pictures developed in France and America through the late 1880s and 1890s, but didn't really become popular as either a functional medium for representing information or for entertainment purposes until the 1900s. As for dreams and the mechanisms of the mind, in 1900 Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams established that it was possible to think of dreams and dreaming as not only understandable but significant.
Freud also provided, in his early writings, an accessible (though rough) notion of the human mind. For him, the mind was divided into conscious and unconscious realms, to which Freud offered plausible interpretive schematics for recognizing how recurrent images and patterns, in everyday life as well as in dreams, often betray unsayable desires.
Keep forgetting the keys to your office, Freud pointed out in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and maybe you don't really want to go there. Keep dreaming of a young, wet Leonardo DiCaprio— well, they did call James Cameron, the director of Titanic, to help out with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Collective dreaming in a theater
By the 1920s, the movies became an influential force in (Western) cultural history, and audiences were"“ consciously and unconsciously"“ involved in forms of collective dreaming. You don't have to be Freudian to realize how motherly and seductive it is (or used to be) to slouch in a comfy seat in a dark space, sucking passively on a soda straw, or smoking (as was permitted until the 1970s) while your eyes are fixed on pleasurable images and stories with happy endings.
On another level, dreams as wish fulfillment and nightmares describes German film of the period, starting with the infamous Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). There were also the surrealists, like Man Ray and Luis BuÓ±uel, who attempted to represent dreams on screen. Their efforts introduced the kind of imagery and dreamlike narratives that films, TV and cool websites employ today.
Fast forward: dream/films range from Hitchcock's Spellbound, Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World, and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep— to name a few. And, it's not for nothing that, eventually, notions like "dream machine," "dream factory" and "dreamworks" became attached to the movie business.
And now, dream websites
Meanwhile, in fields as varied as anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and neurologically based dream/sleep research and sleep science, dreams have been mightily studied. These days, websites are devoted to dream research, dream science and dream and sleep therapy, with hundreds of variations on the subject.
But for all the investigations of dreams, and for all the accumulated testimony and data, there is little that is completely, conclusively, scientifically, authoritatively definite about dreams and dreaming, or what dreams might mean to an individual. In fact, even though electronic neural imaging scanners can record activity and (purportedly) actual images in areas of the dreaming brain, the meaning or significance of an image is up for grabs.
Where's the evidence?
Think about it: if I dream of Jeannie or you dream of Jennie, no one but ourselves can say that we do. There might be "evidence" that something has happened in our dreaming brain, but unless we choose to verify what we've dreamt, it remains a figment, a thoroughly subjective phenomenon. (As for the girl in question, check out another terrific dream film, William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie , from 1948).
Films like Inception develop from the premise that others can determine what we might dream. It's a frightening thought because, in the end, as Freud and others suggested, dreaming might be a way of talking to ourselves about ourselves. And who would want that conversation interrupted?
What, When, Where
Inception. A film directed by Christopher Nolan.
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