1. Manifest content: remembered narrative that plays out in the dream itself. (does not resemble the actual meaning of the dream)

2. Latent content: refers tot the underlying meaning of the dream

All dreams are forms of 'wish fulfillment' --> Freud states: 'My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams'.

--> Freud claimed that every dream has a connection point with an experience of the previous day

--> Dreams as picture-puzzles, can form a "poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance".

Mitchell, W. J. (1984). What Is an Image? New Literary History, 15(3), 503. https://doi.org/10.2307/468718

--> 'My procedure instead will be to examine some of the ways we use the word image in a number of institutionalized discourses and to criticize the ways each of these disciplines makes use of notions of imagery borrowed from its neighbors.

--> Images family tree: mental = dreams, memories, ideas, fantasmata

--> The mental and verbal images would seem to be images only in some doubtful, metaphoric sense. People may report experiencing images in their heads while reading or dreaming, but we have only their word for this; there is no way to check up on this objectively.

--> Now for the thinking soul images take the place of direct perceptions; and when it asserts or denies that they are good or bad, it avoids or pursues them. Hence the soul never thinks without a mental image (Aristotle, De Anima)

--> 'It seems fair to say that the status of mental representation in general, and the mental image in particular, has been one of the main battle-gounds of modern theories of the mind'.

--> Graphic/pictorial as true literal image versus mental / spiritual image as true literal image

--> Imago Dei: Image as likeness

--> Date: from ending sixteenth century onwards

--> Linkage between non rational subject matters and triumph of modern psychology at threshold to modernism has to do with dreams. Western dramatic tradition underpinned dream thematics for the precocious Romantics (shakespeare de la Barca and other dramatists of late Renaissance)

--> Dream thematics ending sixteenth through seventeenth century (Shakespeare's Hamlet)

--> Function dream Renaissance drama 1: Audience saw the dream visions in characters mind on stage: dream intruding into time confirms as a prophetic a 'truth' which audiences already accept as validated ex post facto.

--> Function dream Renaissance drama 2: meta-theatricality of Corneille's L'Illusion comique (1636) underscores the virtual interchangeability of vision or dream with the repertory of actual life as experienced in its multiple forms (verwarren van leven met droomwereld)

--> Notion of alter egos and other entities often a feature in stories by romantic authors (Hoffmann / Allan Poe), but still in modern (post-romantic psychology) nineteenth century authors a common topic (including realists / naturalists). Person might possess various identities.

--> Shopenhauwer (1788/1860): human ego was illusory construct caught between societal codes (Superego Freud) and inscrutable laws of the species which operated through the unconscious (the id) --> Plays from Huysmans (A Rebours, 1884 --> more western) & Strindberg (Ett Drömspel / A Dream Play, 1901 --> more Asian beliefs) well serves to illustrate the breakthrough of Shopenhauer's general influence in literary Modernism

--> Dali (1904/1989) (painter/filmmaker): used his works to assemble seeming keys to a dream state --> entrance into the psyche in surrealism

--> Film makes its rise (1895): Attraction of western publics to psychic threats on the threshold of Modernism: Lot of nighmarisch encounters (Frankenstein) / Vampirism (Dracula, 1897)

--> Traumdeuting Freud (1900)

--> Intolerance (Griffith, 1913): Combination between realism and dream at the end

--> Poet Vachel Lindsay: Theory 'The Art of the Moving Picture (1916): equating movies with various modes of dreaming, quite trechantly asserts that those watching a film are participating in a kind of communal trance-like experience. --> His belief that movies violate boundaries between real and dream moments both individually and collectively is broadly contemporareous with practices in Modernist-Surrealist painting.

--> Film as a medium that can share deeper levels of mind and identity as Carl Gustav Jung said

Li, P., Yang, F., Wang, X., Yao, R., Dai, J., & Yun-Long, D. (2019). What Do You Think About Your Dreams? The Construction of a Belief About Dreams Questionnaire. Nature And Science Of Sleep, Volume 11, 411–421. https://doi.org/10.2147/nss.s227154

--> Study with only Chinese participants (cultural)

--> Since ancient times, China has a keen interest and unique view about dreams.

--> Dreamer profile differences: 29.3% were Indifferent Dreamers: they believe that dreams have no real meaning. 70.3% were Interested Dreamers: They consider dreams to be meaningful.

5 factors in the analysis:

1. Omen & Health:

--> Dreams can foretell the future and can reflect upon one's health --> in line with the views of ancient Chinese thinkers and medical experts on dreams: they believed the main function of dreams was to reflect people's health, and thinkers believed that the function of dreams was mainly to predict good or bad luck. In ancient China, most people believed that dreams could foretell the future.

--> explained the relationship between dreams and physical health: for example, if a person was weak, he/she would dream of water; and if the person was strong, he/she would dream of fire. In Western dream theory, dreams also have these two functions.

2. Dream superstition (beliefs that dreams are closely connected to spiritual dimensions)

--> In ancient China, there were many literary works describing the dream superstitions. Ghosts, Bodhisattva and deceased people enter people’s dreams, make confessions, reveal the truth to clear up injustices, warn, and persuade people to be good

--> Western prescientific dream theories saw dreams as messages coming from outside the individual, mostly from god-like creatures.

3. Dream meaninglessness

--> No research regarding this belief has been conducted in China.

--> A Canadian study showed that only 6.5% of the participants thought that dreams are meaningless

4. Dream reality (dream content related to waking-life experiences)

--> At present, some research supports the “continuity hypothesis”, that is, that the content of dreams reflects waking activities.

5. Dream attitude (attitude about dreams, willing to remember dreams or not)

--> Only one study in China focused on the attitude towards dreams, and it found that the positive attitudes towards dreams can predict individuals’ willingness to engage in psychoanalytic interpretation therapy.

When compared with males, females elicited higher scores in Dream omen and health, Dream superstition, Dream meaninglessness, and Dream reality; males and female showed similar scores in Dream Attitude.

• 123 undergraduate students at George Washington University asked the following: "Do you have any beliefs or theories about the meaning of dreams?" "If yes, what are your beliefs?".

• 89% answered yes and wrote down beliefs: 7 main responses:

  1. Cognitive/information-processing theories of dreaming: They are responses to pre-sleep stimuli

  2. related to events from recent past

  3. dreams are attempts to solve problems.

  4. Psychodynamic theory: Dreams are attempts to give expression to wishes that may not be gratified in reality

  5. they are products of the unconscious.

  6. Dreams are related to fears and anxieties

  7. Dreams could predict the future

• Gender differences: woman more considered cognitive-information-processing type on dreaming beliefs

• "Dreams are related to one's fears and anxieties" had the highest percentage (91%) in the follow up study about beliefs

• Minority (17%) who believed that dreams could predict the future

Do the literal dreams people in different cultures mainly have differ from each other? and does this have something to do with the cultural background? --> how does this relate to the visual culture and does it reinforce these beliefs/dreams?

--> Link to visual culture in Europe about dreams

--> Link to visual culture in United States about dreams

--> Link to visual culture in Asia about dreams

--> Link to visual culture in Africa about dreams

• Baka, are frequently called "Demons" and are thought of as secret societies of humans who turn into animals at will. They are generally feared and children are frightened with them. People have the believe that people don't know how their friends and neighbors are at night.

• Lots of nightmares, cemetary's and messages from supernaturals in dreams

2 main beliefs the Haitian peasants had:

1. The dream may be said to function as one of the vehicles of communication between the gods, the dead, and the living.

   --> One has spoken with a god, when that god was possessing another person, or, in local parlance, was "in the head" of another person (or in their own heads).

   --> difference between dreams and possession: while one does not remember one's own possessions during waking life, one might remember having been possessed in a dream.

   --> Gods are of mixed African, Catholic and Haitian origin.

   --> vodun mythodology plays important role

   --> Dreams and reality intertwine because Haitian peasants get messages they have to do in there lives

   --> Essential point for dreamer: message from god and ability to communicate with them

2. Dream operates on two levels of perception: what is told and what is experienced(more widespread, among primitives as well as elsewhere)

--> Difference (by cultural definition) between dreams and possession experience as contact with deities seems to be the fact that it is possible to dream of being possessed oneself by a given divinity and remember the divinities actions, while possession is followed by amnesia.

--> as soon as you dream of a person, you know it is a divinity. This system of identification very interstingly reflect Haitian race classification, and incidentally Haitian class structure as well.

--> dreaming is thought of as related to one's religion (vodun worshipers are catholics, vodun deities are saits of the Catholic Church.

--> protestants are thought to dream only rarely and with difficulty (they don't believe in Catholic Church nor vodun deities)

--> the reality of the dream world is placed on the same plane as that of waking experience.

• More a study about meaning of dreams people had and what occurred most in the dreams, and link this to reality

• Dreams tell much more than the personal and idiosyncratic psychological aspects of the dreamer's personality in that dream content (motifs, personnel and locale) in a very considerable measure is a function of a discrete cultural view of the universe, a projection of the dreamer's assumptions about the conditions of life with which we must cope

  --> In my research I can link this to Visual culture and the figurative meaning of dreams, what we want to achieve in live.

• In Tzintzuntzan, fear of "what people will say", of public opinion, and not law, is the great force which leads people to conform to traditional and approved norms

• Although emphasis will be on content of dreams, it is important to remember that there is an "ethnography of dreams", the attitudes towards ands the beliefs about dreams held by a people tell us important things about their view of life.

• 2 sort of dreams (beliefs): 1. sueño or dream proper and 2. Pesadilla, or nightmare. The main differences between the 2 are:

  --> Pesadilla is in the local taxonomic system not a dream at all but occurs when ego is just falling asleep, still half awake and not fully unconscious. A Sueño occurs when a person is fully asleep.

  --> The prototype Pesadilla is that it's always, without exception, a terrifying experience, where a "something" called death enters the door. A sueño may be pleasant or frightening but always excludes the theme of death entering the room.

• Causes of (bad) dreams (beliefs): Bad nutrition in childhood. "Greater weakness, more nightmares".

• People tend to look for immediate stimulus to a dream in some experience of the proceeding day --> unconfortable if they don't find one --> interesting parallel to personality trait: in real life every event must be assigned to a cause.

• Dream beliefs;

  --> most believe that dreams may foretell the future

  --> God puts dreams in one's head so they will know what is going to happen

  --> Death in dreams is signaled by 'mucha carne, mucha música, mucha fiesta' or water or a coffin

  --> other beliefs about symbolism in dreams on page 111

• Conclusion about dream themes of most people in Tzintzuntzan: it suggests a poorly developed sense of guilt, and a highly developed sense of shame, a contrast that has been noted in many cultures, past and present.

• 
  

--> West (in this research) = capitalistic parts of the world = Europe, America

-->non west / East (in this research) = More spiritual parts of the world = Asia, Africa

How do people show their dream beliefs through the use of visual mediums?

Does visual culture effect the way people have certain beliefsystems about dreams (both literal and figurative)?

--> Scientific research on dreams has provided a wide range of insights, but many questions remain unanswered about their exact nature and function.

3 main beliefs

• Buddhists regard dreams as mind-created phenomena that still hold importance.

  1. The lens of the Three Marks of Existence: Buddha's Doctrine of Impermanence states that all things are constantly changing, and nothing ever remains the same, not even for a moment. By holding onto these ever-changing things and mistakenly believing that they are exactly what they appear to be, suffering is sure to ensure. Therefore, in order to free oneself from suffering, one must cease all desire and attachments (Brodd et al. 91-92). In Mahayana Buddhism, dreams are no different. Anyone who has ever had a dream knows that dreams are often unstable and constantly fluctuating. In fact, Mahayana Buddhists view dreams as representative of the impermanent nature of the world. Nothing in a dream is real, and nothing can be held on to. By attaching oneself to the dream state, there can be only suffering. This does not mean that dreams are not important—but it does mean that the Doctrine of Impermanence still applies when dreaming, and therefore dreams are not exempt from suffering (Sure 1).

  2. Prophetic dreams belief: Dreams can be messages from a Bodhisattva, an ancestor, or even a god to convey information (Sure 1).

  3. physiological belief 1: Ancient Buddhists were very advanced in the field of psychology, despite it not existing at the time. Ancient Buddhists believed that the symbol of a dream held meaning and could indicate both illness and health.

     Physiological belief 2: dreams could replay the contents of the mind. What the dreamer experienced during the day could come back to him at night in the form of a dream (same conclusions as Sigmund Freud came with thousands years later)

• Buddhists aime to create Lucid dreams (as called and proven in the west) by Dream Yoga.