Dream Research Notes

The following notes are just a few things that I used as inspiration for both my narrative and other concepts behind the film. I accumulated these during the Spring semester of 2010:


- During typical lifespan, a human spends a total of six years dreaming (roughly 2 hours a night)
- Reflections of the subconscious, neural processes during sleep, message from god, predictions of the future.
- Illusory dreams: most likely stem from older memories that experience this accumulation of errors in contrast to authentic dreams that stem from more recent experiences;
- Dreaming can be influenced by various external stimuli; one connection was made to the olfactory, influencing through smell; positive smells (ex: flower smell attributed to positive dreams);

Famous Dream Quotes:

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul
…Erich Fromm

All that we or seem/ Is but a dream within a dream
…Edgar Allen Poe

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
…Charles William Dement

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth comes to the top.
…Virginia Woolf

The poor man is not he who is without a cent, but he who is without a dream
…Harry Kemp

History of Dream Interpretation:

- Early Mediterranean:
- Ancient Greeks constructed temples called Asclepieions, where sick people went to be cured; cures would be effected through divine grace by incubating dreams within the confines of the temple; dreams also considered prophetic or omens; In ancient Egypt, priests also acted as dream interpreters;
- China:
- Raised profound ideas about dream interpretation, such as how we know when we are dreaming and when we are awake; (example) Are you dreaming about being a butterfly or is the butterfly dreaming about being you;
- Freud:
- First argued that the motivation of all dream content is wish-fulfillment, and that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the “day residue”; dreams of children straightforward fulfillment of wishes that were aroused during the previous day (the ‘dream day’); adults are more complicated…the dreams of adults have been subjected to distortion…the dream’s so-called ‘manifest content’ being a heavily disguised derivative of the ‘latent’ dream-thoughts present in the unconscious; As a result of this distortion and disguise, the dream’s real significance is concealed: dreamers are no more capable of recognizing the actual meaning of their dreams;
- Dreams are compromises which ensure that sleep is not interrupted: as a fulfillment of repressed wishes’ they succeed in representing wishes as fulfilled which might otherwise disturb and waken the dreamer;
- The distortion operations that he claimed were applied to repressed wishes in forming the dream as recollected:
- Condensation: one dream object stands for several associations and ideas; thus “dreams are brief in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts
- Displacement – a dream object’s emotional significance is separated from its real object or content and attached to an entirely different one that does not raise the censor’s suspicions.
- Representation – a thought is translated to visual images
- Symbolism – a symbol replaces an action, person, or idea.
- Jung:
- Even inanimate objects in a dream can represent aspects of the dreamer; people in dreams can represent an aspect of the dreamer/tendencies the person may have;
- Archetypes manifested themselves as dream symbols or figures; increases one’s awareness of unconscious attitudes.
- Stressed that the dream was not merely a devious puzzle invented by the unconscious to be deciphered, so that the ‘true’ casual factors behind it may be elicited