Ever since the first appearance of motion pictures, the dominant mode of cinema has been realism--the set of conventions that presents a movie as a window on the shared world of our waking lives. Accordingly, the medium’s amazing capacity to replicate the hallucinatory experience of dreaming has been treated as a mere eccentric curiosity. Recently, the paradigm has been shifting: films that explore the interior space of the mind and portray imaginary worlds have become popular and critical successes. This experimental course investigates an analogy that is often casually invoked in discussions of contemporary cinema: Are films actually like dreams, and vice-versa?

To explore this question, we’ll look for primary evidence in the representation of dreams in narrative films, where they’re used either as a framing device for the whole of the film’s fictional world, or as one means among others to illuminate plot and character. We will also look beyond the use of dream as a convention or plot device to the “dream-like” genres of fantasy, mystery and horror, as well as to surrealist and experimental approaches to cinema.
Participants in the course keep a dream journal and explore for themselves the boundary between the private world of the dream and the public sphere of artistic expression.

Course Objectives:

Dreams and Cinema offers an introduction to:

• The topic of dreams and dreaming, adopting perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and cultural history
• The theories of Freud, Jung, and other psychologists as a basis for understanding dreams, the unconscious mind, and the arts, especially cinema
• Critical examination of the dominance of the realist paradigm in film theory and criticism, as well as the reception of movies as a popular art form
• Consideration of film genres, including experimental film, as authentic popular responses to problems in psychology and philosophy
• Critical analysis of films from a personal perspective and the writing of critical and interpretative essays in response to films