Movie, Media,
Myth and Dreams, Part 2: Dreams Building Bridges to Media
Sanford Rosenberg, PhD,
President of Media Research Associates, has twenty-five years of
experience in Media Psychology. He is an educator, lecturer,
clinician, and consultant on media projects including movies,
games, and the web. He specializes in qualitative knowledge-based
research, examining the relationship between language, story,
structure, symbol, image, emotion, and experience.
Stanley Krippner, PhD, USA,
is professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School, a Past
President of IASD, and co-author of Dream Telepathy and
Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them. In 2002 he
received the American Psychological Association’s award for
Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of
Psychology, and in 2003 the Ashley Montagu Peace Award.
Brigitte Holzinger, PhD,
of the Institute for Consciousness and Dream Research, Austria, is
a psychologist and psychotherapist (Gestalt), who does research in
lucid dreaming and other sleep-related issues. She is also in
private practice.
Abstracts
Sanford Rosenberg, PhD
We live in what could be called
the Digital Age. This new technological explosion is making music,
movies, television programs, images of all kinds, from the sublime
to the pornographic, accessible to human beings of all cultures,
religions and language groups. In an age when the terrorists
incidents of 9/11 or Chechnya are shown on worldwide television
instantly to millions of people and at a time when Janet Jackson’s
breast was on screen to a billion people at the same moment during
the Super Bowl, is it not time for those of us fundamentally
interested in dreams, meaning, symbol and unconscious processes to
address the tidal wave of imagery that imposes itself on ourselves
as well as our clients or our subjects? Should not research
dealing with sleep, dreams, post-traumatic stress, trauma, etc.
include a dimension that addresses the media usage patterns as
well as impact on the populations that are being researched? What
implications might this approach have for our understandings of
the function of imagery in human experience?
Stanley Krippner, PhD: Dreams in
Films, Films in Dreams: Matches and Mismatches
This presentation will focus on
selected dream sequences in cinema, evaluating how well they match
actual dream sequences. It will also note dreams in which the
dreamer reports witnessing the film as if it were a dream and
discuss possible interpretations for this style of dreaming.
Brigitte Holzinger, PhD:
Media Experience and Primary Process
“A picture says more than 1,000
words” is a well-known saying. What often seems overlooked in
dreamwork is how pictures, conveyed through all sorts of media in
our digital world may influence our dreams.
The
proposed presentation will stress the similarities of media
experience and dreams based on Freud’s notion of “primary
processes” upon investigating some similarities between films and
dreams, will speculate on the value this notion might have for
therapeutic work and will raise the question of what impact this
domination of the presence of (digital) media might have on the
collective unconscious.
This
panel will present for discussion and reflection information
designed to stimulate thinking about the current state of research
in the field regarding this emerging phenomena.
