Dream art is any form of art directly based on material from dreams, or using dream-like qualities.

History

References to dreams in art are as old as literature itself: the story of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Iliad all describe dreams of major characters and the meanings thereof. However, dreams as art, without a "real" frame story, appear to be a later development—though there is no way to know whether many premodern works were dream-based.

In European literature, the Romantic movement emphasized the value of emotion and irrational inspiration. "Visions", whether from dreams or intoxication, served as raw material and were taken to represent the artist's highest creative potential.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Symbolism and Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the playwright August Strindberg, who coined the term "dream play" for a style of narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality.

At the same time, discussion of dreams reached a new level of public awareness in the Western world due to the work of Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion of the subconscious mind as a field of scientific inquiry. Freud greatly influenced the 20th-century Surrealists, who combined the visionary impulses of Romantics and Expressionists with a focus on the unconscious as a creative tool, and an assumption that apparently irrational content could contain significant meaning, perhaps more so than rational content.

The invention of film and animation brought new possibilities for vivid depiction of nonrealistic events, but films consisting entirely of dream imagery have remained an avant-garde rarity. Comic books and comic strips have explored dreams somewhat more often, starting with Winsor McCay's popular newspaper strips; the trend toward confessional works in alternative comics of the 1980s saw a proliferation of artists drawing their own dreams.

Dream material continues to be used by a wide range of contemporary artists for various purposes. This practice is considered by some to be of psychological value for the artist—independent of the artistic value of the results—as part of the discipline of "dream work".

The international Association for the Study of Dreams [1] holds an annual juried show of visual dream art.

Notable works directly based on dreams

Visual art

• Many works of William Blake (1757-1827)
• Many works of Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
• Many works of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Literature

• "Kubla Khan" (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (possibly based on a dream provoked by opium)
• Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) and other works by H. P. Lovecraft
• The Art of Dreaming (1993) ISBN 0-06092554X Carlos Castaneda

Film

• The Brother from Another Planet by John Sayles
• Dreams (1990) by Akira Kurosawa
• Many works of Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

Comics

• Many short works of Julie Doucet
• Many short works of David B.
• Jim by Jim Woodring
• Psychonaut by Aleksandar Zograf
• Rare Bit Fiends by Rick Veitch
• Slow Wave by Jesse Reklaw

Works intended to resemble dreams, but not directly based on them

Novels

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
• The Nightmare has Triplets trilogy by James Branch Cabell
  • Smirt: An Urbane Nightmare (1934)
  • Smith: A Sylvan Interlude (1934)
  • Smire: An Acceptance in the Third Person (1937)

Drama

• A Dream Play (1901) and other plays by August Strindberg during his Symbolist and Expressionist periods

Film

• Un Chien Andalou (1927) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
• Many films by Maya Deren (1917-1961)
• Dream scenes are popular in many horror movies, notably the Nightmare on Elm Street series
• Waking Life (2001) by Richard Linklater

Comics

• Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1904-1921) and Little Nemo (1905-1913) by Winsor McCay (also his animated films)
• Many works of Milo Manara

External links

• Dreams: Artwork of the Collective Unconscious