Dream Analysis

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was first presented at the ‘Private Parts in Public Space’ panel, PSi#16: Performing Publics, 11 June 2010.

Notes

1 ‘This can be observed in how the body sets the stage for dreaming, using neurological inhibitors to block stimuli from traveling up and down the brain stem: isolating the head from the rest of the body. In this way actions performed in the dream are not physicalized in the body of the dreamer, and external sensations are blocked out. This block is accompanied by other phenomena occurring within the brain itself. The emotion centers in the limbic lobe are hyperactivated, as are areas of the cerebral cortex that integrate emotion with perception. Other areas are suppressed, such as the frontal cortex, where memory, logic, critical judgment, and directed thought are located. All this helps the dreamer feel, see, and most of all, believe their internal dreamscape. These various effects on the internal operations of the mind have much in common with the effects that are used in film and theatre to help make the cinematic/theatrical experience more believable and emotionally resonant. Thus sound, lighting, and editing provide an emotional scoring to the scene, while our own codes of suspending disbelief allow us to be open to the fictional worlds and events unfolding before us. Further to this the suspension of all physical activity in our bodies renders us as passive and as disassociated in our mental and physical capacities as the “decapitated corpse” of a dreaming body’ (Trubridge 2009, pp.59–60).