In the Traumdeutung Freud famously described dreams as offering us “the royal road to the unconscious.” He discussed a variety of mechanisms at work in what he called “the dream work,” acts of ciphering, condensation, and displacement that constitute the “work” that goes on between the manifest and latent contents of the dream. Whether one accepts Freudian psychoanalysis or not, the notion of the dream as a lurid, enchanting object has carried into many cultural domains, including fictional texts, films, paintings, and forms of popular culture. Dreams can be depicted as riddles, forming an enigmatic and (primarily) indecipherable plot. They can also be used to depict the limitations of mimetic representation and ontological uncertainty in plots where the distinction between anxiety-provoking dreams and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

Conversely, the depiction of overtly traumatic dreams can reveal a fractured ego under threat from images of mutilation and castration, which may be associated with Lacan's concept of the fragmented body and the dissolution of the self. Dreams predominantly appear in genres such as Gothic fiction, littérature fantastique, psychological thrillers, mystery thrillers and science fiction: genres which, by definition, tend to question the allegedly separate realms of reality and fantasy, past and present, and life and death. Furthermore, authors like Marquez and directors like Aronofsky, Araki, and Almodóvar create dreamlike worlds via their artistic stylings.

For Freud, dreams were the starting point of his model for psychoanalytic interpretation, which could consequently be applied to other manifestations of the unconscious, such as symptoms and jokes. For Lacan, dreams are the bearers of the one 'fundamental fantasy' that haunts the subject and navigates their desire, expressing itself in the way the subject experiences jouissance (cf. Evans 2006). Therefore, for both Freud and Lacan, decoding dreams is crucial to successful treatment, and Lacan works dreams into key parts of his seminars, including the dream of the Butcher’s wife, the burning son, Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, and “A Child is Being Beaten.” Surrealists also point to the significance of the dream in order to create modalities of artistic expression that try to express or represent unconscious processes.

In this panel, we will explore the form that dreams take in literature, film, and art; consider how language and imagery interact in artistic dream representations; and examine the unique aesthetics of dreamscapes in film, literature, and the plastic arts. While we ground our understanding of dreams in psychoanalysis, papers do not necessarily have to fall within or be adjacent to psychoanalysis to be considered.

Chairs: Matthew Lovett (Pittsburgh), Julia Bruehne (Bremen)

Please note: Abstracts of 300-500 characters max. can be submitted via the NeMLA homepage only (https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21792) 

 https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21792

 bruehne@uni-bremen.de

 Matthew Lovett, Julia Bruehne