Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting

by Robert T. Eberwein

Overview

Robert T. Eberwein uses a hypothesis from psychoanalytic theory to explore the frequently noticed similarity between dreaming and watching a film. His comprehensive study of the relationship between films and dreams explains the film screen as a psychic structure.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612300
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1124
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Film & the Dream Screen

A Sleep and a Forgetting

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By Robert T. Eberwein

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06619-6

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CHAPTER 1

Part One THE DREAM SCREEN

In part one, I present an overview of major dream theories before developing my hypothesis. Perhaps the desire for a sense of unity with the external world, like that unity established in our earliest experiences as dreamers, explains the motive for the birth of cinema. What Bertram Lewin calls the dream screen, the psychic structure that represents the mother's breast, affords us a primal screen on which we perceive our oneiric world. The viewing of film on the cinematic screen when we are older revives the sensation of the dream screen, a structure that is in part a product of our own ego. This discussion concludes with the consideration that one reason we forget dreams and films lies in the nature of the space in which we experience cinematic and oneiric narratives.

Dream Theories

Since I will be referring to important psychoanalytic and physiological theories of dreams throughout this work and analyzing some of the films in the light of these theories, it seems appropriate to provide a brief summary of the major positions.

The most important theory of the origin and nature of dreams has come from Sigmund Freud, particularly in The Interpretation of Dreams. His work has exerted a tremendous influence on the way we approach dreams in films and on the practice of various filmmakers. Except for some of the silent films, all of the works I discuss were created after Freud's ideas were known and, with varying degrees, understood. But the fact that Freud's ideas were generally known does not mean that any of them were necessarily being applied consciously or accurately.

Essentially, Freud believes that a dream is ultimately an infantile wish that emerges during sleep. The dream's apparent lack of coherence is a result of the dream-work, which performs the following operations: condensation, or the merging of persons and places; displacement, the shifting of psychic attention from important to apparently irrelevant or minor details; secondary revision, the means by which connections and structure are built into the disjointed memories of the dream; and considerations of representability, by which the abstract materials of the dream are given the form of pictorial language.

The dream incorporates material from the most recent events of the dreamer's life, the "day's residue." Since its real motive, an infantile wish, contains erotic material of an unacceptable nature, the operation of the dream-work creates a disguise. In such a covert form, the dream can pass the censor which during the day has succeeded in repressing the wish. But at night, the dream itself leads us back regressively to childhood. All the unfulfilled impulses and desires associated with what Freud calls primary process thinking, primal forces emerging from the id, begin to assert themselves and struggle up through the unconscious, seeking release.

The final dream as we remember it presents only its manifest content to us. The task of analysis of the dream is to discover the latent content, a revelation achieved by examining all the associations that the analysand has in reference to the dream and to daily life. Ultimately, the elements in the dream are seen to be overdetermined; that is, many features are the products of a number of influences, memories, and forces. The analyst attempts to interpret the dream's meaning by sorting through the pictorial puzzle, or rebus, recalled by the dreamer. A successful interpretation will lead both doctor and patient into the buried life of the individual, since dreams are, as Freud sees it, "the royal road" leading back into the unconscious.

Yet another feature of the dream is its importance as a preserver of sleep. To achieve that end, the dream-work will attempt to integrate any external stimuli (ringing alarms, for example) into the narrative so that the dreamer can continue to maintain a state in which the satisfying of a wish is possible.

Freud acknowledges two kinds of dreams that seem to contradict the argument that the dream satisfies an infantile wish. First, nightmares about flunking examinations in particular do not fulfill a wish but allow the dreamer to construct a dream for which no real cause for anxiety in the past was justified. Second, dreams about horrible experiences, such as those reported by war prisoners who actually endured them, occur when the dreamer is attempting to master disturbing traumatic events.

With the exception of examination or traumatic dreams, though, dreams are disguised infantile wishes. As such, they are not the results of somatic influences. Although Freud admits that bodily pressures can play a minor part in dream formation, the thrust of his theory is against the idea that a dream is, in effect, the result of something one ate.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to Freud's theory of dream formation has come as the result of dream research done recently by physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Earlier psychoanalysts sometimes challenged Freud's views and offered alternative theories to explain the nature of the dream. For example, Carl G. Jung argues that the dream is a compensatory activity on the part of the individual rather than a disguised wish. Dreams themselves emerge from the buried psychic life of the dreamer as well as of the human race and display in their content archetypal elements common to all cultures. Still, for Jung (and for Alfred Adler, who also qualifies Freud's theory of dreams), the dream is understood to be a psychic event emerging from the unconscious mind of the dreamer. But, with the discovery of empirical data about the nature of the dreaming process, Freud's view has been severely tested.

The motivating impulse for this revision of Freudian theory has come out of clinical observation of dreamers. Freud himself mentions the work of G. Trumbull Ladd. In 1892, Ladd had noticed that the eyes of someone asleep can be seen to move beneath the eyelids, presumably in the course of a dream. But it was not until the 1950s that the implications of Ladd's discovery became important for dream theory.

By that time, the electroencephalograph (EEG), invented in 1929 by Hans Berger, was being used to measure the activity of the brain under various circumstances, including that of sleep. Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, who had conducted experiments on the effects of sleep deprivation, attached electrodes from the EEG to a sleeper and discovered that the traces of brain activity vary in the course of the night; this suggested that a sleeper passes through different stages of mental activity.

The periods of sleep in which eye movement appeared beneath the eyelids were seen to correlate with a particular pattern of brain waves. When we are awake, our brain waves generate a distinct configuration on the EEG. As we fall asleep, we move through four stages, each signaled by a specific kind of brain wave, before entering the stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement, which is accompanied by its own unique pattern on the EEG. In REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the low intensity waves are fast and produce a sawtoothed design.

Analysis of the EEG data indicates that dreaming is a phasic activity linked to REM sleep and occurs five or six times during a night as part of a general pattern of brain activity. Each movement from stages one through four, followed by an REM period, takes approximately sixty to ninety minutes. Then the dreamer repeats the passage through the stages again. Toward the end of the night's sleep, more time is spent in dreaming periods (REM sleep).

As a result of these and related discoveries, scientists found themselves reversing Freud's claim that the function of the dream was to preserve sleep. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true: the function of sleep was to permit individuals to dream. Studies of sleep deprivation revealed that dreaming is a necessary part of our activities as human beings.

In addition, by watching for indications of when the dreamer had entered REM sleep, the researchers could waken the dreamer and ask for the content of the dream. This permitted them (and the dreamer as well) to recover dreams that might otherwise have been lost from memory. Moreover, it allowed them and later researchers who employed their methodology to follow the course of dreams in a given night. Some studies revealed that the dreams of a single night may even have a unifying theme or pattern. Also, some experimenters used this technique to test the influence of recently experienced phenomena on the content of dreams. For example, researchers tried to see if particular dream images could be induced by depriving the sleepers of certain things (water) or by exposing them to others (pornographic films).

By the end of the 1950s, it was generally agreed that dreams occurred in the REM phase of sleep. Moreover, as a result of various experiments conducted by such scientists as William C. Dement (who coined the term REM sleep) and Howard P. Roffwarg, sleep researchers suggested that the rapid eye movements were themselves ocular actions on the part of the dreamer "watching" the dream. For example, a high percentage of vertical eye movement was determined to be related to the content of a dream about shooting basketballs. Other patterns of eye movements appeared to be related to such dream actions as climbing stairs.

But these conclusions — REM sleep is dreaming sleep; eye movements during this period reflect the dreamer's activity in the dream — came under scrutiny for a number of reasons. First, scientists pointed to the fact that newborn infants display an extremely high percentage of REM sleep. But it could hardly be imagined that neonatals were "dreaming." Second, sleep researchers conducting experiments similar to those which had been used to defend the initial hypotheses argued that the correlations observed in earlier research were inadequate. W. David Foulkes, for example, found that sleepers awakened during periods of sleep other than the REM stage also reported having dreams. These dreams were not as vivid as those reported in the REM stage and were characterized more by reflective thinking; but they were still dreams, if a dream is understood as a hallucinatory experience in which some kind of visual or linguistic activity occurs. Some researchers suggest that the distinction between REM and NREM (non-rapid eye movement sleep) is similar to that which Freud posits between primary process and secondary process thought — primal, libidinal urges as opposed to intellectualized activity. The claim that the eye movements could be correlated with the events seen by the dreamer was also challenged by several other scientists. For example, Ralph J. Berger and Eric Moscowitz ran similar experiments and arrived at much less convincing and statistically reliable data.

One of the most significant arguments raised against the conclusion that the eye movements necessarily followed the material being observed in the dream has come in relation to studies of the neurophysiology of dreaming. These studies have also been the most influential in calling Freud's theory of dreams into question. A number of scientists have explored the neurophysiological aspects of dreaming, among them William C. Dement, Mardi Jon Horowitz, Richard M. Jones, Michel Jouvet, and Frederick Snyder.

Although not the first to discuss dreaming from a neuro-physiological perspective, Robert W. McCarley and J. Allan Hobson have received perhaps the greatest amount of attention lately. Essentially they argue that the phasic nature of dreams and our entrance periodically throughout the night into the D (desynchronized) state are primarily results of the operations of our neurophysiological systems. The technical aspects of their theory are extremely complex, but, without simplifying too much, the following summary fairly captures their argument. At various times during the night, the dreamer's system undergoes a completely involuntary series of reactions involving chemical and neuronal activity. Discharges of neurons occasioned by the action of the Pontine reticular cells stimulate various parts of the lower brain, particularly the section of the cortex controlling visual activities. In effect, the periodic firings through the system provide a jolt that causes eye movements. These, in turn, issue "commands" to the entire brain and lead to the calling up of various sensations and perceptions which the brain offers as correlates to the neuronal impulses.

Thus the images we "see" during dreams are our brain's response to the endogenous stimulations that occur every ninety minutes during sleep. Rather than offering an index of how we follow the action of what we watch as dreamers, the rapid eye movements precede the hallucinated images in our brain, and, in effect, call up visual elements that match them. Hobson and McCarley see the brain as a vast computer, processing an abundance of commands and information. Not surprisingly, the dream is a jumbled and confused affair, composed as it is out of a series of unrelated commands issued in the course of the rapid eye movement phase of sleep. The brain does what it can to effect some linkage in the information confronting it: its response is the dream.

Although they do not deny that a dreamer's characteristic feelings and desires can be elements in such dreams, they do reject the thesis that a wish is the motivating force for the dream. Since the dream is understood as consisting of images isomorphically related to a series of events in the brain, it can hardly be approached as an infantile wish.

Recently Hobson has applied their activation-synthesis theory to film and suggested a number of physiological and psychological parallels between dreaming and the experience of film. In addition, he specifically argues that their theory corrects not only the psychoanalytic shortcomings of Freud's theory but also what they see as its negative and deterministic effects on criticism. Thus he says: "Activation-synthesis frees the investigation of dream cognition ... from the Freudian strait jacket of historical and pathogenic determination by viewing dream synthesis as both original and conflict-free." Freudianism generally "has misled both psychiatry and filmmaking."

Readers will see that in the following pages I attempt to maintain an eclectic rather than an exclusive approach to this complex material. Hobson's objections notwithstanding, I believe that our considerations of dreams and their appearance in films can be enriched by cautious application of the psychoanalytic theory he questions. In addition, when appropriate, I incorporate the findings and suggestions of researchers and theorists in other disciplines such as linguistics and child development.

The Desire for Cinema

When the Lumière brothers first showed their film of a train coming into a railroad station, many in the Parisian audience of 1895 fled out onto the street, terrified of the engine that seemed about to enter their three-dimensional space. Their inability to distinguish the appearance of the flat but moving image from reality is mirrored in a short film made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show. The hero, obviously attending his first motion picture, watches the screen in amazement. He too sees a train coming at him; rather than running from the theater, though, he simply ducks, and then peeks behind one edge of the screen. Earlier in the film, when a dancing girl appears on the screen, he steps to the stage and attempts to dance along with her. When he sees a farm boy courting a girl, Uncle Josh tries to interfere with the romance by entering into the action he sees before him. But he succeeds only in pulling down the screen, revealing a projectionist behind it. The men grapple, in slapstick fashion, and the film ends.

Yet another example of the inability to distinguish appearance from reality occurs in Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963). Michelangelo, a young soldier, equally unfamiliar with the nature of film, enters a theater for the first time. He too is disturbed by the sight of a train, but the most interesting response that the viewing experience elicits from him comes as he sees a girl taking a bath. He explores the screen, trying to effect a better, more comprehensive view; only by mastering the space of the screen will he be able to see the complete body of the woman. But his actions fail to achieve his voyeuristic aim, and, instead, he pulls down the screen.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Film & the Dream Screen by Robert T. Eberwein. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Introduction, pg. 3
• Part One. THE DREAM SCREEN, pg. 9
• Section 1. A TAXONOMY OF DREAMS, pg. 53
• Section 2. MANIFEST DREAM SCREENS, pg. 91
• Section 3. THE RETROACTIVE MODE, pg. 140
• Conclusion, pg. 192
• Notes, pg. 194
• Bibliography, pg. 221
• Index, pg. 239