Analysis of Dream Worlds Characteristic in Works of Art

Abstract

Freud once said that the “interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconsciousness activities of the mind.”1 Indeed, he was right since dreams are mostly a product of unconscious forces, understanding them allows people to get a more complete picture of who they are. Not only is the message of a dream fascinating but also the way it is created. Dreamers often describe their dreams as weird, yet they do not understand the why. That is because our unconsciousness cannot speak to us directly, so it uses symbols instead. This method of delivering information to a dreamer becomes quite creative for many psychoanalysts. What is more important, artists often describe dreams as a powerful creative tool and a source of inspiration. Howard Lovecraft, for example, wrote an entire story called Dagon just after having a terrible nightmare. In this paper, I am going to apply psychoanalytic theories to understand better the creative process of artworks in order to see how much art intersects with psychoanalytic theory. Some artists were familiar with dream theories and used them successfully in their works. However, it does not mean that the creations of those who were not aware of these theories will be treated with less attention. The aim here is to see how artists combined knowledge about dreams and their imagination to create art. The study is not a judgment of the quality of the art itself. As a criterion for selecting artwork for analysis, I decided to review artworks that contain a dream world representation. I will focus on reviewing works that contain an environment with dream features: weird atmosphere, absurd in actions, a reflection of daily experience, etc. In my analysis, I will refer to different create mediums as well. In this paper, one will find examples of literature, cinema, and video-games. Every medium seems to have its benefits, for example books can contain a vast amount of written content and detailed description, cinema is limited in time but has a dynamic storytelling function and video games are something in between those two since they operate within a dynamic (entertaining) element and written information. Nevertheless, the dream world can be created with all necessary details in all of these media. Finally, every example given in the paper, adopts dreams for delivering its own idea. Lewis Carroll, for example, compared absurdness of the real world to absurdness of dreams whereas developers of Dragon Age tried to explain the mystery element of a dream by attaching dream origins to the afterlife world. Dreams are still attracting huge interests of many people, and they will do the same in any form of art.