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Issue 23. Time and Photography / La Photographie et le temps

Some Thoughts on Dream Aesthetics

Author: Mikita Brottman
Published: November 2008

Abstract (E): As Freud acknowledged, the same narrative capacity that helps us make sense of reality
also helps us to make sense of the dream. However, although the dream's waking analogue
is usually considered to be fiction, dreams are seldom, if ever, language-based. In what language do dreams speak to us? Do we dream in words, illustrations, or moving images? In considering the dreams of a group of young artists, I offer some tentative thoughts and questions about the
aesthetics of dreams.

Abstract (F): Nous savons depuis Freud que les facultés narratives qui nous aident à donner un sens au réel, aident aussi à donner un sens au rêve. Toutefois, et en dépit du fait que la fiction passe souvent pour l’équivalent éveillé du rêve, il est rare, pour ne pas dire exclu, que les rêves soient d’abord des constructions verbales. Mais dans quelle langue est-ce que les rêves nous parlent ? En mots, en illustrations, en images ? En analysant les rêves de quelques jeunes artistes, j’essaie d’apporter quelques nouveaux éléments de réflexion à l’analyse des rêves.

keywords: Dreams, Freud, Narrative, Language, Images, Memories, Media.

To cite this article:

Brottman, M., Some Thoughts on Dream Aesthetics. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 23 (2008).
Available: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/timeandphotography/brottman.htm

Making Sense of Our Dreams

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud made the case that the dream experience was all primary process; the umwelt of dreams, he claimed, was not something that could be put into language. Hartmann (1996) concurs, reminding us that, “though we are often forced to work with verbal dream reports, we need to keep in mind that these are only attempts to render the dream experience in a preservable and reproducible form.” When we talk about a person’s dream, then, what we really mean is the account of their dream given after the fact, translated into the secondary process of language, space, and time.

Today’s dream researchers are not psychoanalysts but neuroscientists, who gather data from research in sleep laboratories, where PET scans and EEG scans of the brain are made while the sleeper is dreaming. The main debate in the field today is whether the primary function of dreams is psychological of physiological. The leading theorist in the field, J.A. Hobson (1998), champions the physiological model, arguing that dreams are an epiphenomenon of neuronal firings in the brainstem during the REM cycle. Dreaming, argues Hobson, is adaptive; the healthy brain continues to “tick over,” sending out electric impulses even during sleep, like a screensaver that keeps an idle computer from crashing. Dreams result when the cortex struggles to “confabulate” the random images, thoughts and memories that are activated during the sleep cycle.

In his thorough and thought-provoking work on the notion of authorship in dreams, Bert O. States (1994) makes the argument that the virtual world of the dream usually takes the form of fragmented, broken episodes created from current memories (Freud’s “day residue”) combined, as in the waking creative process, with elements evoked by associational memory. As Freud acknowledged (1900), the same narrative capacity that helps us to make sense of waking experience also operates when we try to make sense of the dream. In order to understand the data it encounters during the night, the mind needs to orient itself in terms of space, time, social context and ongoing events. This is why, Chafe argues (1990), most people recount their dreams in narrative terms.

Dream and Narrative

Most of the work that has been carried out on the form and style of dreams considers how they relate to narrative, perhaps because the dream’s waking analogue is usually considered to be fiction. The narrativity of dreams is an interesting subject that has been written about at some length as a way of inquiring into cognitive aspects of narrative structure. Briefly, according to States (1994), dreams work according to the same basic system as conscious storytelling, and rely on the same fundamental skills, which include so-called “double-mindedness” (that is, the ability to split the mind into the writing/dream, and the reader/dreamer). States explains that, while creating a narrative, the writer is, essentially, dreaming under different circumstances. In other words, while the dream is an original creation, its invention is made possible by the extrinsic structures (scripts, characters, plot elements and so on) that we borrow from waking life.

In some of his recent work (2006, 2008), Richard Walsh has challenged the widespread assumption that narrative, capable as it is of expression in different media, is constituted by a medium-independent content. Walsh interrogates both the role of the medium in narrative and the foundational narrative concept of “the event,” elaborating a concept of narrative-recognition as a cognitive faculty. To reflect on the narrative qualities of a dream, according to Walsh, we would need to take into account the enormous variety of narrative forms, from epics, to graphic novels, to “flash fiction” (micro-stories of a single page or less), not all of which have a causal connection between episodes, which is often considered to be the one quality that all narratives share.

Dreams, even when retold, do not always have causal connections between events. They may contain episodes that are randomly linked, or not linked at all. They may consist of sudden moments in time, or broken, non-linear fragments. Their point-of-view may be displaced and sporadic; there may be no protagonist, no consistent viewer perspective. Yet while the logic connecting these episodes may not be obvious to the waking mind, the dreaming brain has a special kind of associational power; it has the capacity, as Kahn and Hobson put it, “to jump from one class of images/thoughts to another” (1993). So while the waking mind, looking back on a dream, may see no causal connections, only incongruity and discontinuity, the logic may be that of condensation or overdetermination; the episodes may be connected according to the principle of resemblance; they may constitute a series of variations on a theme, or some other process whose logic remains unknown to the waking mind.

Image and Language

While narrative is generally considered to be language based, dreams, for the most part, are formed from images, with language as a secondary consideration. Whether the creation of narrative is a linguistic process or a cognitive process independent of language is a matter of long debate (see, for example, Kilroe); I’d like to suggest, however, that at least in the realm of dreams, word and image are not necessarily as distinct as they are generally considered to be in waking life.

There is a reason for this. When we try to remember our dreams, and to describe them, we use the left hemisphere of the brain, the part that is involved primarily in speech processing, written language, and the encoding and recall of verbal, temporal, sequential, and language related memories. But these memories have been created and stored in the right hemisphere of the brain, using primary process functions. The right brain is unable to establish sequences, which accounts for the often sporadic and non-sequential “order” of dreams. Moreover, when we sleep, the language processing part of the brain is “off-line,” with the result that the language of dreams is not the language of speech, names and narrative, but that of emotions, memories, and associations. While dreaming, in other words, the mind uses the toolbox of the unconscious, which, instead of words and sentences, holds only symbols, puns, metaphors and allegories. Nevertheless, the dreaming mind has the capacity to form ideas and images quite fluidly, sometimes even simultaneously, in representational terms. Often, in a dream, no sooner do you think of something than it has already happened.

George Lakoff (1993) has argued convincingly that language develops as a reflection of conventional ways of thinking within a culture. Over time, Lakoff suggests, the metaphoric properties of words become unconscious, so a word like “understand” no longer has the obvious correlate of “standing under”— that is, supporting or bearing by dint of one’s own power.  Lakoff suggests that most metaphors are grounded in bodily experience that is then projected on to the outside world in the form of a cognitive map. He writes: “correspondences in real existence form the basis for correspondences in the metaphorical cases, which go beyond real experience”, adding that conceptual metaphors have the capacity to impose themselves on real life “through the creation of new correspondences in appearance” (43). Much language, then, functions as a code, whose individual elements, if isolated and made conscious, would be the equivalent of a unit of thought. These units of thought form the language of dreams, just as their shorthand equivalents form verbal language in waking life.

Hobson (1998) argues that dreams are less like the language-based narratives of fiction than films and “multimedia events.” More recently, Colin McGinn (2006) has suggested that our immersion in dreams and films are similar experiences, in that both offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with “our essential nature” as centers of consciousness. When we are watching a film, explains McGinn, the images on the screen lose all bodily mooring and become sheer figments of our imagination, indistinguishable from the images we dream. Some may argue that, unlike dreams, films seem real, but McGinn points out that dreams seem real too, while we are dreaming them, if not in retrospect.

The Dreams of Young Artists

With these ideas in mind, I worked with a class of twenty-five young visual artists, primarily image-driven (so-called “right-brained”) thinkers, who often had trouble expressing themselves in words (both written and spoken). Our dream workshop ran for the 2007 fall semester (sixteen weeks), meeting for three hours each week. In between classes, the artists were asked to record and discuss their dreams in an online forum. The students in this workshop were all aged between 20 and 22, and all said they remembered their dreams most nights, or every night. They averaged 6-8 hours sleep each night, and spent 6-8 hours each day working on their art, which included time-based forms like video and digital media, as well as abstract, non-narrative forms like sculpture, printmaking, illustration, fibers, and drawing. The participants, according to their own calculations, spent an average of two hours each day watching movies and/or television, another two hours surfing the web, and two hours reading. In considering the dreams of those for whom narrative, in the sense we normally use the term, is not the most obvious form of engagement, I wanted to understand more about the role of aesthetic form and perception in the dreaming process.  

Dreams are normally more vivid than memories, since, as Walsh (2008) explains, “any inhibiting awareness of our actual somatic sensory environment is radically attenuated during sleep.” However, these dreamers often described their dreams as not only more vivid than memories, but as more vivid even than waking life. They were often vibrant, colorful and rich in detail; their general affect was described as variously “frightening,” “engaging,” “exciting,” “unsettling,” “anxious,” “strange,” and “surreal.”  They were often difficult to describe because they eluded the ordinary expectations of narrative. For example, although they were mostly experienced directly (although some featured films or other forms of media within the dream itself), they did not always involve the dreamer, and when they did, the dreamer did not always take his or her waking-life form. Some dreamers became different people in their dreams; sometimes they were a different gender, or spoke a different language. Sometimes they were animals or even objects (in one case, for example, a sock). The dreams as they were retold generally took the form of personal narratives, short dramatic incidents, or fantasies, sometimes epic in length and tone. Everyone in the class reported the regular use of dreams as inspiration in their artwork, and all felt that dreams were meaningful, whether simply as a way of “playing out feelings, wishes and anxieties you were unaware of” or, at the other extreme, actually “telling you what will happen in the future.”

The class often presented dreams in which metaphors were literalized, which is not unusual in dreams: we may dream of someone letting a cat out of a bag, or of someone being banished to a doghouse. Most often, however, the associations of this group were slightly more oblique. For example, Alison had a dream in which she and her boyfriend were in a van by the edge of a lake, and, trying to get back to the road, her boyfriend accidentally put the van into reverse, forcing them back into the lake, from which there was no escape. Discussing the dream, it was clear to Alison was not “going forward” in her relationship, and that she had got herself “into deep water”. Kate had a dream in which she and her roommate got into an angry fight over two violins—a plain one, which neither of them wanted, and a yellow one, which they both preferred. Kate herself quickly traced the association between “violins” and “violence,” and between “yellow” and “cello” (the instrument her roommate really played in waking life).                        

Multi-Media Dreams

Not unsurprisingly, the form of the dream was often closely related to the dreamer’s preferred artistic medium. A painter often had dreams of paintings (“they are only one scene and I feel I know every part of the scene”). A sculptor dreamed of “amazing sculptures that I could never feasibly make.” Most obviously, however, those working in video and digital media had dreams that took the form of vignettes of movies, including all the familiar structural possibilities of such forms: flashbacks, 3D sequences, switches of perspective from one character to another, close-ups, long shots, zooms, and, in one case, even a “dream sequence”.

Dream researchers have demonstrated that individuals who are easily absorbed into various different forms of media often have particularly imaginative dreams, which they are often able to control as a way of solving problems. Gackenbach, Heilman, Boyt, and LaBerge (1985) have found that such individuals are better able to recognize that they are dreaming during the dream (lucid dreaming). It has been shown that “positive transpersonal states, such as lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and mystical experiences” are related to such “right-brain” attributes as advanced spatial perception (Gackenbach & Bosveld, 1989; Hunt, Gervais, Shearing-Johns, & Travis, 1992; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990; Swartz & Seginer, 1981), while the reverse is true for “negative” transpersonal states, such as nightmares (Spadafora & Hunt, 1990).

Some interesting work is currently being done on the relationship of the mind’s narrative faculty to the representational and rhetorical capacities of new media, independent of linguistic processes (see, for example, Walsh, 2008). In a study the dreams of video game players, Jayne Gackenbach (2006) considers the implications for consciousness of regular video game play, which has, she points out, been shown to improve the various cognitive skills used in such games. In her study, Gackenbach found several potential indicators of consciousness development among frequent video game players, including an increased tendency to experience lucid dreams, observer dreams, and more vivid and memorable dreams. In my research I found this to be the case, but I also found that the aesthetic effects of video games—such as rapid editing, sudden movements, and battlefield scenarios—are often reproduced in the players’ dreams. Here is a typical dream reported by Zach, a frequent video game player whose artistic medium is interactive digital animation. While Zach’s dreams were always heavily influenced by the video games he played every day, they were not duplicates of these games, but composites:

I'm a super fast spy on some sort of 1950's illustrated style battlefield. All the colors are very primary and contrast-y. At one moment I'm sprinting between cover as to not get shot. The next moment I pick up a sniper rifle and aim at a guard in a tower. BAM! I take him down and continue onward. In a flash I've finally made it to the gates of the fort me and my mates have been battling towards. I'm just one man in the midst of all kinds of different soldiers. There are guys firing rocket launchers, guys running around with machine guns, and snipers hiding behind broken chunks of walls and pieces of large debris. Now I'm resting, waiting for the right moment to run through the door. Everyone is barging in without any sort of strategy.       
There are some gunners taking them out one by one as they run in. From behind me a sniper fires and takes them out. Now! I suddenly take out an aluminum baseball bat and zoom through the gate. In a flurry as I run I'm taking out the opposing side. I'm so fast that they can't even get a good aim on me. Into the depths of their fort I go, deep down a dark stairwell. Past rooms filled with the early super computers, into some sort of office where there is a single briefcase sitting on the desk. I open the briefcase and inside is a teleportation device, and papers full of enemy plans. I turn around, start running out, hit the button on the device, and FLASH! I'm back to the safety of my own base.

 

Prior to having this dream, Zach had been spending a lot of time playing a game called Team Fortress 2 which, he said, the imagery of this dream resembled. He showed me a screen shot from the game, to give idea of the visuals, which were similar (though not identical) to the visuals of his dream.

fig.1 "Zach's dream", publicity still from the video game Team Fortress 2

Colors and Creatures

One of the most distinct elements about the dreams of this group was their use of color. Sometimes, the dreamers commented about this outside any particular element of the dream itself: “everything was saturated in color,” “the color was intense,” “there was VERY good color,” “the color palate was muted, mostly dull greens, purples, browns, and grays,” “everything had a grey/green tone to it,” “the dream was very green, not too bright, not too dark, but deep green,” “the colors were mostly sort of umbers with gold light,” “everything had a bluish gray tinge,” “the dream was one hue with a few pinpricks of vivid, unnatural color.”  Frequently, however, the color was related to objects or places in the dream itself, as in the following cases:

Everything had a reddish brown, muted tinge, until I went outside and everything had a golden tinge but there were lots of bright blue robins. I was in some sort of art gallery/warehouse complex, lots of white wall space… There were smaller rooms of white walls spread out, kind of a maze of rooms, with bright colored balloons covering the floors. There were individual musicians wearing deep blue colored costumes. Some one told me it was Black Dice. Next I was in one of the crowded ballooned white walls and some kind of performance piece was happening. One of the performers was tying colorful woven threads to people’s wrists in the audience. I was sculpting an enormous sculpture of a bull. It was somewhat cubist and all white except for a small section that I had silver leafed. There was a black milk maid describing the feminist struggle of the female cow against her offspring. Odd animals and birds often featured prominently in these dreams, including “strange cattle, cows with huge heads,” “a small, violently orange tyrannosaurus with pointy teeth,” “terry cloth stuffed cats and dogs roaming around, alive,” “seven orange baby platypi” and “two puffins angrily smushing their heads together.”

 

 

fig.2 (courtesy Ryan Emge)

fig. 3 (courtesy Brandon Hall)

fig. 4 (courtesy Noah Pfarr)

    
Another recurrent motif in the dreams of this group was physical transformation. In one dream, the dreamer described pulling a rancid mushroom out of the flesh of his forearm. “Underneath the rotten flesh,” he wrote, “was a still born flower bud. Since the bud was already dead and in the process of decomposition, it was not solid enough to remove it in one piece. I woke up before I could carve everything out of the festering cavity”. Some more examples:

I was leaning against the counter and taking plates out of the dish rack to put away and I kept getting distracted by their patterns. They were printed with close up photographs of cross sections of red onions, green peppers, and ears of corn. They were massive dogs, larger then a tall human, with collars around their necks made of magical spinning blades that glowed red. The collar came down their chests into a kind of ornately crested polished silver armor. I was seeing everything in X-Ray. Then, there was a dog sitting on the floor, and I could see all his bones (because of the X-Ray powers), and he had a beach ball in his stomach. On each of the cheapo racks (the four-sided kind that spin, with the metal pegs for the hangers) were several varieties of bathing suits and lingerie sets. I noticed all of the door handles were on the opposite side they are normally supposed to be on. All the doors I used in the dream were familiar to me and I know now that the handles were all on the wrong side. I was in a very ornate Victorian house. The inside was decorated extravagantly with accents of gold on certain pieces of furniture, and the color red seemed to be everywhere. The red didn't make me feel threatened; it was just like a velvet red that was on the furniture, and even the carpet, I think.

Particularly interesting was the intensely episodic quality of the dreams, which raises questions about the role of narrative-making as a cognitive faculty independent of language. According to Richard Walsh (2008), “there is no meaningful sense in which narrative can be thought of except as medium-independent: no event, however minimal, is structured as such except in cognitive terms, and the same applies a fortiori for sequences of events”. However, Walsh also finds it “hard to see how dreaming can be understood as anything other than a narrative process,” concluding that, “if this is so, dreams present a challenge to narrative theory on several fronts.”

Significantly, for these young dreamers, dream images were not always bundles of associations with real-world equivalents; they were sometimes new things in their own right, unattached to the confines of the tangible world. For many “right-brained” thinkers, it seems that dreams—like musical notes, colors, and abstract forms—can represent things that do not exist in the world outside the dream. Their dreams, then, becomes correlatives for new possibilities, new states of mind, new avenues of thought and emotion. For “right-brained” thinkers, dreams can evoke things as they are, but they can also suggest things as they are not, or as they might be in an ideal world. The dreams of these young artists seemed to bring things together in a new way, suggesting a world of unlimited shapes, colors, and possibilities. For this group of dreamers, the inner landscape of their dreams is clearly not a lesser substitute for the “real world,” but, on the contrary, a landscape so vivid that the world of waking life seems limited and disheartening in comparison.

Works Cited

Chafe, Wallace, “Some things that narratives tell us about the mind.” In  B.K. Britton & A.D.

Pellegrini (Eds.), Narrative thought and narrative language, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,1990, 79-98.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vols. 4&5 (orig. 1900). Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1958: 488-508.

Gackenbach, Jayne. “Video Game Play and Lucid Dreams: Implications for the Development of Consciousness,” Dreaming 16 (2) 2006: 96-110.

  ----- and Jan Bosfeld, Control Your Dreams, New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
  ----- and Nancy Heilman, Sheila Boyt, Stephen, “The relationship between field independence and lucid dreaming ability,” Journal of Mental Imagery 9, 1985: 9-20.

Hobson, John Allan, The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates both the Sense and Nonsense of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Hartmann, Ernst. “Outline for a Theory on the Nature and the Functions of Dreaming,” Dreaming, 6 (2), 1996: 112-134.

Hunt, Harry T., Gervais, S., Shearing-Johns, S., & Travis, F., “Transpersonal experiences in childhood: An exploratory empirical study of selected adult groups,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 75, 1992: 1135-1153.

Kahn, David, and John Allan Hobson, “Self-Organization Theory of Dreaming,” Dreaming, 10 (3), 1993: 151-178.

Kilroe, Patricia, “The Dream as Text, the Dream as Narrative,” Dreaming 10 (3), 2000: 125-137.

LaBerge, Stephen, Lucid Dreaming. New York: Ballantine, 1986.

Lakoff, George, “How Metaphor Structures Dreams: The Theory of Conceptual Metaphor Applied to Dream Analysis,” Dreaming 3(2), 1993: 77-98.

McGinn, Colin, The Power of Movies – How Screen and Mind Interact. New York: Pantheon, 2006.

Spadafora, Aurelia, and Harry T. Hunt, “The multiplicity of dreams: Cognitive-affective correlates of lucid, archetypal and nightmare dreams.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 71, 1990: 627-644.

States, Bert O., “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions,” Dreaming 4, 1994: 237-253.

Swartz, P., & Seginer, L., “Response to body rotation and tendency to mystical experience,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 53, 1981: 685-688.

Walsh, Richard, “The Narrative Imagination across Media,” Modern Fiction Studies, 52.4,Winter 2006, pp. 855-868.

---- “Dreaming and Narrative Theory.” In Frederick Luis Aldama, Arturo J. Aldama, and Patrick Colm Hogan, Eds., Toward a Theory of Narrative Acts. Cognitive Approaches to Literature Series, University of Texas Press, 2009 (forthcoming).

Thanks to all the students in the Dream Workshop, Fall 2007, Maryland Institute College of Art

Mikita Brottman is Professor of Literature, Language and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art.
E-mail: mbrottman@pacifica.edu

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