Dream art is any form of art directly based on material from dreams, or which employs dream-like imagery.
Some dream art works revolved around the scenes of dreams, other works focus on the philosophical debate between dreams and reality.
The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric; that is, different locations and objects continuously blend into each other. The visuals (including locations, characters/people, objects/artifacts) are generally reflective of a person’s memories and experiences, but conversation can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms. Some dreams may even tell elaborate stories wherein the dreamer enters entirely new, complex worlds and awakes with ideas, thoughts and feelings never experienced prior to the dream.
People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses like auditory, touch, smell and taste, whichever are present since birth.
The most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness. Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones.
A small minority of people say that they dream only in black and white. A 2008 study by a researcher at the University of Dundee found that people who were only exposed to black and white television and film in childhood reported dreaming in black and white about 25% of the time.
History:
References to dreams in art are as old as literature itself: the story of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Iliad all describe dreams of major characters and the meanings thereof. However, dreams as art, without a “real” frame story, appear to be a later development—though there is no way to know whether many premodern works were dream-based.
In European literature, the Romantic movement emphasized the value of emotion and irrational inspiration. “Visions”, whether from dreams or intoxication, served as raw material and were taken to represent the artist’s highest creative potential.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Symbolism and Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the playwright August Strindberg, who coined the term “dream play” for a style of narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality.
At the same time, discussion of dreams reached a new level of public awareness in the Western world due to the work of Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion of the subconscious mind as a field of scientific inquiry. Freud greatly influenced the 20th-century Surrealists, who combined the visionary impulses of Romantics and Expressionists with a focus on the unconscious as a creative tool, and an assumption that apparently irrational content could contain significant meaning, perhaps more so than rational content.
The invention of film and animation brought new possibilities for vivid depiction of nonrealistic events, but films consisting entirely of dream imagery have remained an avant-garde rarity. Comic books and comic strips have explored dreams somewhat more often, starting with Winsor McCay’s popular newspaper strips; the trend toward confessional works in alternative comics of the 1980s saw a proliferation of artists drawing their own dreams.
In the collection, The Committee of Sleep, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett identifies modern dream-inspired art such as paintings including Jasper Johns’s Flag, much of the work of Jim Dine and Salvador Dalí, novels ranging from “Sophie’s Choice” to works by Anne Rice and Stephen King and films including Robert Altman’s Three Women, John Sayles Brother from Another Planet and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. That book also describes how Paul McCartney’s Yesterday was heard by him in a dream and Most of Billy Joel’s and Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s music has originated in dreams.
Dream material continues to be used by a wide range of contemporary artists for various purposes. This practice is considered by some to be of psychological value for the artist—independent of the artistic value of the results—as part of the discipline of “dream work”.
The international Association for the Study of Dreams holds an annual juried show of visual dream art.
Paradox:
While people dream, they usually do not realize they are dreaming (if they do, it is called a lucid dream). This has led philosophers to wonder whether one could actually be dreaming constantly, instead of being in waking reality (or at least that one cannot be certain, at any given point in time, that one is not dreaming).
In the West, this philosophical puzzle was referred to by Plato (Theaetetus 158b-d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011a6). Having received serious attention in René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, the dream argument has become one of the most prominent skeptical hypotheses which clearly has an archetype in elements of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave also.[citation needed]
This type of argument is well known as “Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly” (莊周夢蝶 Zhuāng Zhōu mèng dié): One night, Zhuangzi (369 BC) dreamed that he was a carefree butterfly, flying happily. After he woke up, he wondered how he could determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi. This was a metaphor for what he referred to as a “great dream”:
He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.
One of the first philosophers to posit the dream argument formally was the Yogachara Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (fl. 4th to 5th century C.E.) in his ‘Twenty verses on appearance only’. The dream argument features widely in Mahayana Buddhist and Tibetan Buddhist thought.
Some schools of thought in Buddhism (e.g., Dzogchen), consider perceived reality ‘literally’ unreal. As a prominent contemporary teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, puts it: “In a real sense, all the visions that we see in our lifetime are like a big dream […]”. In this context, the term ‘visions’ denotes not only visual perceptions, but appearances perceived through all senses, including sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations, and operations on received mental objects.
A paradox concerning dreams and the nature of reality was described by the British writer Eric Bond Hutton in 1989. As a child Hutton often had lucid dreams, in which everything seemed as real as in waking life. This led him to wonder whether life itself was a dream, even whether he existed only in somebody else’s dream. Sometimes he had pre-lucid dreams, in which more often than not he concluded he was awake. Such dreams disturbed him greatly, but one day he came up with a magic formula for use in them: “If I find myself asking ‘Am I dreaming?’ it proves I am, for the question would never occur to me in waking life.” Yet, such is the nature of dreams, he could never recall it when he needed to. Many years later, when he wrote a piece about solipsism and his childhood interest in dreams, he was struck by a contradiction in his earlier reasoning. True, asking oneself “Am I dreaming?” in a dream would seem to prove one is. Yet that is precisely what he had often asked himself in waking life. Therein lay a paradox. What was he to conclude? That it does not prove one is dreaming? Or that life really is a dream?
In art
The depiction of dreams in Renaissance and Baroque art is often related to Biblical narrative. Examples are Joachim’s Dream (1304–1306) from the Scrovegni Chapel fresco cycle by Giotto, and Jacob’s Dream (1639) by Jusepe de Ribera. Dreams and dark imaginings are the theme of several notable works of the Romantic era, such as Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (c. 1799) and Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781). Salvador Dalí’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) also investigates this theme through absurd juxtapositions of a nude lady, tigers leaping out of a pomegranate, and a spider-like elephant walking in the background. Henri Rousseau’s last painting was The Dream. Le Rêve (“The Dream”) is a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso.
In literature
Dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative; The Book of the Duchess and The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman are two such dream visions. Even before them, in antiquity, the same device had been used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosata.
They have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll’s logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and flexible causality.
Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle and The Neverending Story’s world of Fantasia, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness. Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in a number of works by Philip K. Dick, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. Similar themes were explored by Jorge Luis Borges, for instance in The Circular Ruins.
In popular culture
Modern popular culture often conceives of dreams, like Freud, as expressions of the dreamer’s deepest fears and desires. The film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939) depicts a full-color dream that causes Dorothy to perceive her black-and-white reality and those with whom she shares it in a new way. In films such as Spellbound (1945), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Field of Dreams (1989), and Inception (2010), the protagonists must extract vital clues from surreal dreams.
Most dreams in popular culture are, however, not symbolic, but straightforward and realistic depictions of their dreamer’s fears and desires. Dream scenes may be indistinguishable from those set in the dreamer’s real world, a narrative device that undermines the dreamer’s and the audience’s sense of security and allows horror film protagonists, such as those of Carrie (1976), Friday the 13th (1980) or An American Werewolf in London (1981) to be suddenly attacked by dark forces while resting in seemingly safe places.
In speculative fiction, the line between dreams and reality may be blurred even more in the service of the story. Dreams may be psychically invaded or manipulated (Dreamscape, 1984; the Nightmare on Elm Street films, 1984–2010; Inception, 2010) or even come literally true (as in The Lathe of Heaven, 1971). In Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, The Lathe of Heaven (1971), the protagonist finds that his “effective” dreams can retroactively change reality. Peter Weir’s 1977 Australian film The Last Wave makes a simple and straightforward postulate about the premonitory nature of dreams (from one of his Aboriginal characters) that “… dreams are the shadow of something real”. In Kyell Gold’s novel Green Fairy from the Dangerous Spirits series, the protagonist, Sol, experiences the memories of a dancer who died 100 years before through Absinthe induced dreams and after each dream something from it materializes into his reality. Such stories play to audiences’ experiences with their own dreams, which feel as real to them.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice finds the Red King asleep in the grass; Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her that the Red King is dreaming about her, and that if he were to wake up she would “go out—bang!—just like a candle….” A similar theme is explored in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, told from the perspective of the dreamer in his own realm of dreams.
In the 1999 movie The Matrix, machines imprison the human race and plug them into “the Matrix”, an enormous machine system that uses human bioelectricity and body heat as a biological battery to power the machines. Connected to the Matrix, the humans are kept in a dream-like state, in which they dream of being in the world as it is today; they have no reason to suspect that it is anything other than the real world. Certain people sense the innate artificiality of the illusion and, through various means, “wake up”, breaking free of the Matrix. The overall theme of the series is the “waking dream” scenario, and speculations on which reality is preferable. This concept is further explored during the second Matrix film where one of the main characters appears to be able to utilize abilities usually used in the “dream” in what the character currently believes is “reality”, leaving the viewer to question if the character is in fact in reality, or if they are still inside the dream.
In the original television series The Twilight Zone, the episode “Shadow Play” (written by Charles Beaumont, originally aired May 5, 1961, Season 2, Episode 26) concerns a man trapped in a recurring nightmare in which he dreams he is a prison inmate sentenced to death and to be executed; he tries to convince the characters in his dream that they are only figments of his imagination and that they will cease to exist if the execution is carried out.
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars”, after losing a close colleague in the Dominion War, Captain Sisko confides in his father about leaving Starfleet. Sisko suddenly experiences visions that he is an African-American named Benny Russell who lives in 1950’s America and writes stories for a science-fiction pulp magazine. Inspired by a drawing of a space station, Benny writes a story about a Captain Sisko set on Deep Space Nine in a future where the racial prejudices of the period no longer exist. Benny then faces backlash from the publishers who refuse to run a story about a black Captain resulting in Benny suffering a nervous breakdown. The episode left it ambiguous whether Sisko’s life in the 24th century is real or the result of imagination combined with mental illness.
Richard Linklater’s Waking Life deals mostly with this subject, revolving around a man becoming aware of having been trapped inside his own dream.
In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Normal Again”, Buffy is poisoned by a demon, causing her to flash between her life as usually portrayed on the series and another reality, where she has been in a mental institution for 6 years for believing the original reality. The viewer and Buffy herself are presented with uncertainty as to which reality is the hallucination; Buffy even mentions that she was institutionalized after she saw her first vampire and wonders whether she might have been hallucinating a life with exciting, supernatural elements since then. (Her psychologist discusses how Buffy had snapped back to “reality” for a few months, corresponding to the period when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was dead in the show’s usual narrative.) The non-supernatural world has both her parents alive and together. Both realities appear completely plausible, in a paradox of sorts. She opts for the world with no vampires or other supernatural beings, as her life as a Slayer is full of pain and grief. However, when her mother tells her she is strong and capable, she returns to her “Slayer” reality. The last scene shows her sitting in the mental institution, in a vegetative state and hallucinating her life as a Slayer. A similar premise is used by the sixth season episode “Labyrinth” of Smallville.
In “Perchance to Dream”, an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, Bruce Wayne is trapped within an idealized dream world by the Mad Hatter. In this dream world, Bruce Wayne was never Batman, his parents are still alive and he is engaged to be married to Selina Kyle. Bruce Wayne is nearly convinced of this world’s authenticity when Leslie Thompkins rationalizes that Bruce has concocted the Batman persona to compensate for having been entitled to everything in life. Wayne eventually figures out that he’s dreaming when he realizes that any text he tries to read in the dream is garbled.
Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception deals with the fictional science of shared dreaming. The characters enter others’ minds, to steal ideas, or in the rare case of inception itself, plant them while the target is unaware they are dreaming. Once in a dream, the characters can enter other layers or dreams within dreams. In the movie, characters can distinguish a dream by using totems, unique items whose properties and behavior are different in a dream than in the waking world. In the end, the film leaves open the question of whether the protagonist is himself dreaming.
Films such as Total Recall and Blade Runner, which are both based on stories by Philip K. Dick, also hinge upon the idea that what you remember and perceive is not always real.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty greatly explores the protagonist Raiden’s (and by extension, the player’s) diminished sense of reality, and that what you perceive may not be what is truly reality.
Ted Dekker’s Circle Series protagonist wakes up in an alternate reality every time he goes to sleep.
Doctor Who explores the idea of the dream argument many times. In the ninth episode of series four “Forest of the Dead”, the Doctor’s companion Donna is “saved” into the Library’s hardrive and begins to live out an imaginary and fake reality; unaware that the reality she is living is an illusion until a disfigured woman who had been killed in the “real” world and respectively submitted into the hard drive convinces her that her life is not real. In the seventh episode of series five “Amy’s Choice” the two companions of the Doctor, Amy and Rory Pond, have to decide between two realities; one where they are happily married and the other where they are still travelling with the Doctor, and the only way to escape is to kill yourself in the fake reality. Since they are not sure which one is fake and which is real, they are hesitant to choose. In the Christmas special of 2014 Last Christmas, this concept is once again used where an alien species latches onto your brain to devour it, but makes you dream so you are unaware while they digest. Similar to Inception, it explores the ideas of shared dreaming and the main characters question whether they’re awake or still in a dream. The Doctor points out there are multiple ways to determine the answer, such as asking questions that you should know the answer to but don’t, having different people read the same book and discover that the text is different, or even the appearance of fictional characters, such as Santa Claus.
In the Futurama episode “The Sting” the character Leela goes through many cycles of dreams in which her crewmate Fry is speaking to her, she herself is unable to comprehend what is reality and what is a dream, eventually revealing the entire world itself to be merely an illusion.