1st Edition

Envisioning the Dream Through Art and Science

By Robert Kuzendorf, James Veatch Copyright 2013
    276 Pages
    by Routledge

    276 Pages
    by Routledge

    This monograph is the product of an interdisciplinary experiment--an artistic experiment and a psychological experiment--focused on dreams. Inspired by the prevalence of dream imagery and "dream logic" in surrealist art, the authors asked 100 art students to create digital images representing critical scenes from one of their dreams, then to create a surrealist collage from the digital images. The resulting collages tend to capture the surreality envisioned in actual works of surrealist art, as two collages included in the book illustrate. Inspired also by the psychological problem of studying other minds, the authors asked the 100 art students to describe their dream in writing, to interpret their dream, and to complete two personality measures: the Short Form of the Boundary Questionnaire and the Brief Symptom Inventory. The art students' scores on particular personality scales were found to be statistically associated with particular dream aspects, many of which are visually observable in the digitized dream images created by art students with particular personalities but are not verbally discernible in the dream descriptions written by those same students. The appendix contains, for each art student, the digitally imaged dream, the written description and written interpretation of the dream, and scores on the Boundary Questionnaire and on the depression, anxiety, hostility, and somatization scales of the Brief Symptom Inventory. The book concludes with a bibliography and an index to some of the visual elements in the 100 digitized dream images.

    An Interdisciplinary Experiment on Dream Imagery

     Experimental Methods

     Artistic Experiment: Surrealism and the Boundaries between Subconscious Dreaming and Reality

     Penetration of the Boundaries between Dream and Reality

     Quest for Archetypal Manifestations of Subconscious Impulses

     Use of Collage to Make Incongruities Compatible

     Conclusions from the Artistic Experiment

     Psychological Experiment: The Problem of Other Minds and the Visual Content of Dreams

     Connections between Emotions Underlying a Dream and Visual Aspects of the Dream

     Connections between Symptoms of Psychopathology and Visual Aspects of the Dream

     Conclusions from the Psychological Experiment

     Appendix with 100 Artists’ Verbal Descriptions, Interpretations, and Digital Images of Their Own Dreams

     References

     Index to Dreams

    Biography

    Robert Kuzendorf, James Veatch