Dreams and Movies

After viewing another movie with a dream as the main theme, I was again very interested and impressed by that subject. Since I was a child, I always had crazy dreams and sometimes I wrote them down and tried to analyze them. Dreams always seemed to me as the biggest riddle, and I ascribed to them big importance.

So, to go back on the movies… Naturally, as I was drawn to dreams I liked to view every movie in which a dream plays a big part. A movie is ,for me, one of the best mediums to represent a dream, because I find a close resemblance between them. They are both visual representations, an assemblage of images, illusions and in both of them we identify ourselves with persons. If you watch a movie trying to analyze every scene, first you will try to understand every object in it and it’s reason for being there. In the same manner you will examine every little thing in a dream – objects, colors, persons… As I am not an expert for dream interpretations, I’d like to point out on a paragraph from Sigmund Fraud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams :


Gruppe * speaks of such a classification of dreams, citing Macrobius and Artemidorus: "Dreams were divided into two classes; the first class was believed to be influenced only by the present (or the past), and was unimportant in respect of the future; it included the enuknia (insomnia), which directly reproduce a given idea or its opposite; e.g., hunger or its satiation; and the phantasmata, which elaborate the given idea phantastically, as e.g. the nightmare, ephialtes. The second class of dreams, on the other hand, was determinative of the future’’.

As I see it, this types of dreams described here are using a kind of language as a tool too communicate (forsee the future) or to react on reality, very simililar to the language director is using while making a movie, that may indicate to the next action, forsee the next step.


When you look at Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams for example, you may find a perfect formation of a dream and a movie. Series of his actual dreams represented through a movie, a dream analized and then reconstructed by him. He uses his own symbols and interpretates at the same time what he thinks his dream means. And on the end there is a viewer, dream is not for his „eyes“ only but is available for a group of people - it is exposed for a million of different understandings and analasys. He made his dreams public and saw them all once again. That’s the thing everyone would love to be able to accomplish – to see it once again and to record it forever.
As I allready have said there are a number of movies dealing with this subject, and I may write down some of the other titles worth paying attention to, for example: Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) , Waking Life, The Science of Sleep, Oculto...

As this post became longer then I expected, I’ll put it to an end with one fact that tells us about first attempt to record a dream and it dates back to 3000-4000 B.C., where they were documented on clay tablets.