The Place of Dreams in Art
Dreams have been a matter of curiosity for centuries due to their unknown structure and involuntarily occurrence which made them an excellent subject of research and an endless source of creativity. While there is a scientific aspect to dreams, there is an immense portion of art that was influenced by its potential to draw inspiration from. Starting from ancient times with an outstanding work of literature, the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh which is considered to be written circa 2150–1400 BC, to this day with countless artworks from numerous fields such as painting, photography, sculpture, music, literature, and so much more found dreams as a tool, a theme, and the main subject for themselves thanks to the unknown and limitless world of them.
Even though it may be impossible to define dreams, it’s fair to say they are creations mostly including twisted images, emotions, and sensations that occur spontaneously in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and function of dreams have been a subject of philosophical, scientific, and religious aspects of every civilization throughout history.
It’s possible to research dreams scientifically, furthermore, there’s even a scientific study of dreams named ‘oneirology’ in which the brain activities during the phase of sleep is examined, however, the scientific aspect of dreams falls away from the meaning and the purpose of this complicated structure that the brain offers involuntarily.
That’s when dream interpretation comes along which is the attempt of finding the underlying message within the dreams since there is one according to plenty of cultures and religions. Just like Sigmund Freud’s extensive theories about dreams in the early 1900s in which he explains dreams as representations of deepest desires, every object, event, or image has a different meaning in every person’s conscious while it’s often the same in every interpretation. Because of this, this method also falls flat in the understanding of the dream process.
These are the reason why the nearly perfect way to convey the various meanings and feelings of dreams is through any form of art. The dreams allow having a colorful yet blank canvas for artists to play with while revealing their highest creative potential without boundaries of the real world. Even though the artwork isn’t directly about dreams, using a portion during the creation of an artwork nourishes complexity and creativity thanks to its tangled structure.
The ‘dream art’ has countless examples in the history of art, especially in drawings, literature, music, and films. Despite maybe being the hardest way to portray dreams, paintings filled with different interpretations of dreams, how dreams may look has created endless paintings especially by well-known artists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes with his monumental 1883 painting, ‘The Dream,’ Salvador Dali’s ‘hand-painted dream photographs,’ as he referred to all of his paintings, and more recently, Max Magnus Norman who paints dreamlike images with photorealistic quality and often a touch of the absurd. The marvelous beauty of drawing inspiration from dreams reveals itself when looking at the three completely different works of art, revealing three unique perspectives and tastes.
Just like painting, literature, and other art forms, does the exact same thing but with the magical world of words. While there are infinite examples to stress how literature conveys the understanding, feeling, and the notion of dreams, there are a few to represent the rest such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem, ‘Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment’ which was composed one night after he experienced a dream and thanks to that dream, the poem is immensely different from other poems written during that era, bringing out the uniqueness in the poet. For instance, the inspiration may come in a dream if you ask just like Mary Shelley who was ‘possessed by her imagination right before or during sleeping of her ‘waking dream’ which resulted in her writing the famous 1818 novel, ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.’
Overall, dreams have been holding a significant and special place in the creation of each and every artwork, bringing out the instinct of artists to express their dreams, or others, through their art and creativity which extended and improved the artforms to a tremendous playground and creativity field, therefore, the complicated structure of dreams benefitted the creation of art and expression.
