Art, Literature, Film and Dreams
Mark Hagen, MA, is the
Director of the International Institute for Dream Research. He
graduated from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, in Clinical
Psychology in 1983, and undertook three years of analytical
training in Depth Psychology. He is the author of Restoration
of the Dream. He has kept a dream journal since 1977.
Abstract
The primordial event of language
opened human experience to metaphorically view life as a literary
work of art. Dreamwork reflects the artistic representations and
poetic fashion currents of the dreamscreen of history. As a
literary and visual art and science par excellence the theatre is
an institutionalized voyeuristic space. Film and TV in the 20th
century have replaced the theatre as a popular entertainment.
Dreams may be described as movies, with images projected onto a
dreamscreen within the mind. As literary narratives or
screenplays, dreams can be categorized into genres. Within the
narratives of the dreams of individuals, patterns, common themes
and symbols emerge which are indicators of collective literary
narratives for the groups to which individuals belong. Individuals
living in a speech community are shaped via instruction to learn
their culture's literary mythological storehouse inheritance.
American myths such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick provide the
dark literary archetype for the American communal dreamscreen. By
contrast L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz (and the make-believe of
Judy Garland's rendition of "Somewhere over the Rainbow") creates
a distinct idealistic American message, "there is no-place like
home".
Dream
research can use the tools of literary criticism to understand the
underlying mythologies and philosophies that produce the textual
description of the dream, and vice-versa. Fredric Jameson "The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act" sees
the historical past only as being understood as parts of a single
collective story. For Jameson literary and social criticisms are
aimed at the individual and collective narrative structures of
history i.e. Historical Novel.
