Main description:

This monograph is the product of an interdisciplinary experiment--an artistic experiment and a psychological experiment--focused on dreams. Inspired by the prevalence of dream imagery and "dream logic" in surrealist art, the authors asked 100 art students to create digital images representing critical scenes from one of their dreams, then to create a surrealist collage from the digital images. The resulting collages tend to capture the surreality envisioned in actual works of surrealist art, as two collages included in the book illustrate. Inspired also by the psychological problem of studying other minds, the authors asked the 100 art students to describe their dream in writing, to interpret their dream, and to complete two personality measures: the Short Form of the Boundary Questionnaire and the Brief Symptom Inventory. The art students' scores on particular personality scales were found to be statistically associated with particular dream aspects, many of which are visually observable in the digitized dream images created by art students with particular personalities but are not verbally discernible in the dream descriptions written by those same students. The appendix contains, for each art student, the digitally imaged dream, the written description and written interpretation of the dream, and scores on the Boundary Questionnaire and on the depression, anxiety, hostility, and somatization scales of the Brief Symptom Inventory. The book concludes with a bibliography and an index to some of the visual elements in the 100 digitized dream images.

Contents:

An Interdisciplinary Experiment on Dream Imagery

Experimental Methods

Artistic Experiment: Surrealism and the Boundaries between Subconscious Dreaming and Reality

Penetration of the Boundaries between Dream and Reality

Quest for Archetypal Manifestations of Subconscious Impulses

Use of Collage to Make Incongruities Compatible

Conclusions from the Artistic Experiment

Psychological Experiment: The Problem of Other Minds and the Visual Content of Dreams

Connections between Emotions Underlying a Dream and Visual Aspects of the Dream

Connections between Symptoms of Psychopathology and Visual Aspects of the Dream

Conclusions from the Psychological Experiment

Appendix with 100 Artists' Verbal Descriptions, Interpretations, and Digital Images of Their Own Dreams

References

Index to Dreams