Languages of imagination
: films and dreams

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

How do the languages of cinema and dreams influence one another? In the past, we borrowed elements from religion and mythology to express intense emotions and fantasies in art and dreams. Our contemporary world is overloaded with a large variety of visual media, such as cinema and television and offers us new figures and motifs to symbolise the same emotions and desires that existed in the past. Movies affect the content and the visual language of dreams, as proven in my collaborative project, Dreampire. I video-recorded hundreds of dream reports and found thematic and narrative elements from mainstream films in dreams. This research examines how narrative strategies and cultural figures circulate between dreams and cinema. The dissertation contains analyses of 43 dream reports with film references and 4 significant filmic representations of dreams, Andalusian Dog (Louis Buñuel 1929), 8 1/2 (Fellini 1963), Mulholland Drive (Lynch 2001) and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010). Because film was metaphorically depicted as a dream, psychoanalysis is a relevant framework for film analyses and narratology for studying the dreams reports. This research aims to detect dream-work functions in the films and film-work functions in the dreams. The findings of how interchangeable the dream-work and film-work functions are can validate the oneiric theory's continued relevance. Moreover, the study's authentic contribution to Cultural Studies is the definition of specific narrative tactics through which film references are built into dreams and circulated in cultural memory.
Date of Award10 Jan 2024
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorIsabel Capeloa Gil (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Film
  • Dream
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Narratology
  • Cultural studies
  • Cultural memory
  • Visual media
  • Circulation

Designation

  • Doutoramento em Estudos de Cultura

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