Logic Of Dreams Research Articles

Two personalities of an alcoholic (alcoholic disease from the point of view of the doctrine of psychic realities)

The article examines the phenomenon of two personalities of an alcoholic. Research into alcoholism has shown that in alcoholic reality a person behaves differently than in ordinary life. He commits a number of acts that he usually avoids for various reasons; at the same time, the alcoholic experiences unusual sensations and states. If we look at these observations from the point of view of the teaching developed by the author about "psychic realities", then an assumption about a certain similarity between the reality of dreams and alcoholic reality suggests itself. Indeed, in both realities a person realizes desires that he usually cannot realize for a number of reasons (the so-called "blocked desires"); in both cases, a person's consciousness is weakened and altered; to realize blocked desires in both cases, the psyche builds in consciousness the events necessary for this, which the person experiences. In both cases, there is an unusual logic of "life" (in the first case, the logic of dreams, in the second, the logic of alcoholic experiences). Just as after dreams a person wakes up in another (ordinary) world, and often does not remember at all what he dreamed about, after intoxication a person also comes to his senses without any particular consequences. The features of alcoholic behavior considered here can be attributed to the phenomenon of multiple personality. A sober person is one personality, and a drunk person is another. Other features of the two personalities of an alcoholic are also considered.

The Painting of Dreams: An Effective Expression of Reality

This paper discusses, from the perspectives of aesthetics and psychology of literature and art, how artists can effectively express reality through dreams in their paintings. The discussion primarily revolves around several key questions. On one hand, it explores why artists choose dreams as a subject for their creations, why dreams represent a form of reality, and why paintings should also express reality. On the other hand, it acknowledges that while dreams can serve as an intuitive visual representation, they often feature absurd and chaotic scenarios. This paper aims to help art practitioners see the psychological logic of dreams in order to find the truth deep within their hearts. It also discusses how using dreams as a subject can visually present reality and emotionally resonate with the audience.

Self-abnegation, Decentering of Objective Relations, and Intuition of Nature: Toomas Altnurme’s and Cao Jun’s Art

Abstract This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations to come into being. In Section 3, I elucidate Jun’s painting in its power to decenter the usual, object-oriented, circumspection of the mind. I ground my analyses in Freud’s concept of dream logic. Freud’s work on dreams allows me to approach Jun’s creative process as a work of translation whereby the artist translates the preconscious elements into images that we – the audience – then see on canvas. In Section 4, where I offer a comparative examination of both artists, I rely on Bergson’s articulation of the importance of intuition in order to show that both Altnurme and Jun create artworks that disclose to us the non-objective dimension of life wherein action or process and possibility take precedence over objectively existing things.

Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

ABSTRACT: Experimental in form with a narrative animated by chance and the uncanny in ways that prompt incredulity, Gun Island (2019) can be read as Amitav Ghosh's endeavor to write a compelling work of fiction centered on climate change that provokes its readers into action; this is just the challenge he had posed to writers in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017). There, Ghosh argued that in order to effect a change in policy and mindsets there is an urgent need to write in fresh new rhetorical modes that strategically mobilize the logic of dreams, the uncanny, and myth, rather than cold science and reason, which have failed to convey the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Ghosh argues that we have taken refuge in paranoia rather than courage and faith that climate change can indeed be reversed, else why would we be so paralyzed by a deadly fatalism in the face of seemingly apocalyptic climate change? Utopian in impulse, Gun Island presents us with new aesthetic and epistemological modes, deploying the uncanny and the magical to provoke new insights about climate change and to re-vision new alliances between the precariat—refugees, migrant workers—and the well-meaning bourgeoisie, engendered by a powerful sense of the wonder of the natural world. In effect, Gun Island gestures to new collectivities and argues for an alternative vision of multi-species eco-justice, where human exceptionalism is not the norm.

The Crows, and: Worm Sap Moon

:"The Crows" is about the strange logic of dreams, in which what is wild calls us out of ourselves.Abstract:"Worm Sap Moon" is about the human desire for connection and meaning.

Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

ABSTRACT: Experimental in form with a narrative animated by chance and the uncanny in ways that prompt incredulity, Gun Island (2019) can be read as Amitav Ghosh's endeavor to write a compelling work of fiction centered on climate change that provokes its readers into action; this is just the challenge he had posed to writers in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017). There, Ghosh argued that in order to effect a change in policy and mindsets there is an urgent need to write in fresh new rhetorical modes that strategically mobilize the logic of dreams, the uncanny, and myth, rather than cold science and reason, which have failed to convey the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Ghosh argues that we have taken refuge in paranoia rather than courage and faith that climate change can indeed be reversed, else why would we be so paralyzed by a deadly fatalism in the face of seemingly apocalyptic climate change? Utopian in impulse, Gun Island presents us with new aesthetic and epistemological modes, deploying the uncanny and the magical to provoke new insights about climate change and to re-vision new alliances between the precariat—refugees, migrant workers—and the well-meaning bourgeoisie, engendered by a powerful sense of the wonder of the natural world. In effect, Gun Island gestures to new collectivities and argues for an alternative vision of multi-species eco-justice, where human exceptionalism is not the norm.

Dream logic and unreliability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Narratologists remain divided over how and if narrative unreliability works in literary dream sequences. Many believe that Wayne C. Booth’s idea of unreliable narration as a “secret communion” of author and reader “behind the narrator’s back” does not extend to surrealistic prose styles, in which Booth claimed “the author and reader may meet, like Voltaire and God, but they do not speak”. While recent scholarship has challenged this notion, few studies have examined how traditional norms of unreliability might function within literary dream logic specifically. My paper aims to reconcile these approaches, using as a case study Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), a text unique in pairing dream prose with a narrator whose self-deception exemplifies the ironic gap central to unreliable narration. Employing theories of unreliability, narrative processing, and dream interpretation, I analyse the relationship between dream logic and narrative structures in The Unconsoled. I argue these dream laws come to signify the narrator’s self-deception, rendering his account suspect as an alternative, ironic account emerges in its shadow. Examining these concepts together illuminates how unreliability might operate outside conventional realism while showcasing how dreams can function as literary devices within one of the most enduring frameworks in narratology.

Angstlust

My approach to Oswald Iten’s text was to perform acts of ambivalent homage—the cruelty of Michael Haneke is paired in my film with the capaciousness of Chris Marker—as a form of memory work embedded in a domestic present. I tried to allow a dream logic of condensation, doubling and displacement to guide the shaping of the whole, which was whittled down from a much longer adaptation of Oswald’s rich account. My narrator is embedded in his own memories.

Creating an Escape Room for Cultural Mediation: Insights from "The Archivist's Dream"

The Archivist’s Dream („Der Traum der Archivarin“) is a Live Escape Room Game that has been developed by the University of Krems’ Center for Applied Game Studies on behalf of the Archives of Contemporary Arts in Krems, Austria, which are dedicated to collecting pre-mortem bequests and post-mortem estates of outstanding artists. Located in the underground facilities of the archive, the Escape Room interweaves selected archival materials, historic media devices and archivist approaches to form an interactive puzzle experience. However, it is not an interactive exhibition showcasing the archives’ contents; and while the Escape Room incorporates elements of educational game design, it is an example for a less common application of (Escape Room) Games: the use of game design in the field of cultural mediation (Kulturvermittlung). Instead of following an educational goal in the narrower sense, the Escape Room is designed to turn aspects of cultural mediation and archival practice into gameplay principles, focusing on letting players explore the tenets of archival thinking rather than on “teachable” content. This is achieved by establishing different levels of (un-)reality players have to travers within the game: players follow a fictional archivist into her dreams, which merge with the real-life archives. In order to “escape” this dream world, players combine archival practices with dream logic to solve a secret tied to actual archival materials, while at the same time dissolving the borders between real life, dream and game.

New weird fiction and the oneirologic of both-and

ABSTRACT Sigmund Freud discovered that in the unconscious a both-and dream logic prevailed. In his critique of the either-or binary oppositions of Western philosophy, Jacques Derrida appropriated this oneirologic, e.g. arguing that the incest prohibition derived from both nature and culture. In this article, I adopt a deconstructive approach to analyse this both-and oneirologic in a selection of New Weird fiction, namely The City & The City (2009) by China Miéville, the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) by M. John Harrison. Not only do these New Weird fictions embrace the dream logic of both-and, they deconstruct the binary opposition proposed by Miéville between the Weird and the hauntological in that they combine the uncanny with what Miéville terms the ‘abcanny’. In other words, they are both Weird and hauntological. Furthermore, I argue that the ‘real externality’ H.P. Lovecraft associated with Weird fiction is always already inside, marked with the oneirologic trace of the unconscious.

Hugo Moreno, Donde se acaba el norte

Reviewed by: Donde se acaba el norte by Hugo Moreno Daryl Spurlock (bio) Hugo Moreno, Donde se acaba el norte. Glyph Publishing, 2021. Pp. 268. Reading Donde se acaba el norte is like wandering into a cabinet of curiosities whose curator is fascinated by New Mexico and its neighbors on both sides of the Mexican-US border. An imaginative work of fiction set mostly in New Mexico, Moreno's novel is grounded in a deep knowledge of Apache, Hispanic, and mestizo practices as they have developed there since the seventeenth century. Given its subject matter, one is tempted to substitute the words "history" or "historical fiction" to describe Moreno's narrative, but to do so would be to overlook one of the novel's great assets; Donde se acaba el norte questions the very nature of temporality and our (in)ability to accurately and chronologically recount the people, places, and events that precede us. Part of the satisfaction readers can draw from Donde se acaba el norte comes from piecing together precisely how characters and their eras relate to each other and to the novel's protagonist, who for simplicity's sake we can call Uriel/Diego. In broad terms, though, the plot unwinds in several settings: the seventeenth century, first in a Spanish mission along the Camino Real leading to Santa Fe and later in the mountains and plains of the Apache homeland, and the late twentieth century, in Mexican and US border states and in Ithaca, New York. Readers join Uriel/Diego on his shapeshifting and world-transforming adventure as he weathers—more successfully than most—the Inquisition and the harsh religious discipline of the colonizers' frontier mission. In episodes that resonate with Fray Servando's escapades in Arenas's El mundo alucinante, Uriel/Diego questions the faith and practices of his spiritual community. Unlike Servando, however, the protagonist of Donde se acaba el norte, unsure of himself and lacking the conviction of his brethren, hardly protests moments of shocking injustice. As a creature of his late-twentieth-century academic training in pluralistic postmodernism, Uriel/Diego finds himself able to recognize wrongs, but feels paralyzed by indecision in how to respond. Luckily for him, Moreno provides an escape hatch that sends Uriel/Diego on to the next stage of his quest and allows the protagonist to evade any duty to act. While some readers may find such sidestepping disappointing, others may, like Uriel/Diego himself, understandably be [End Page 117] ready to move from the confined, monotonous world of the mission and on to wider vistas. When Uriel/Diego finds himself far removed from a settlement along the Camino Real, he not only contends with the long-unconsidered Indigenous part of himself, but is also challenged to absorb a new cosmology and foreign-yet-familiar belief practices that are quite different from the doctrine taught in the mission from which he has emerged. Students of Native American history might find many of the scenes in this second setting edifying and indeed entertaining, but they, like Uriel/Diego, will remain at a remove, observing the practices without ever committing to participate. Editor's footnotes, peppered throughout the book but especially in this portion, add to the sense of an intellectual, rather than a spiritual, exercise. In each of these locales, faces and speech patterns modulate according to the epoch to which they correspond, but only faintly. Emphasizing the slipperiness of time and gender and language as fixed concepts—or perhaps as a nod to the creative inventiveness of human psychology—the protagonist discerns in the face of his American psychotherapist a feminized, 1990s manifestation of a male character we meet from centuries before. Similarly, the archaic Castilian of the Early Modern friars has the same distancing effect as the second-language Spanish of the Indian guide, Refugio, but both registers are accessible to twenty-first-century readers. Whatever the language conventions, if conversations often seem implausible, this is understandable, as they are uttered in the realm of the subconscious, projections of the knowledge and urges of the sleeping Uriel/Diego. Rather than dramatic recreations of naturalistic speech, dialogues reflect the logic of dreams and the stiltedness of medieval morality...

A Reading Attempt On The Relationship of Film and Dream Experience: The Secret Face

Classically defined films, which adopt the logic of daily life and proceed in a linear line, try to give the audience a kind of "real life" experience, while the films that go beyond the usual system and exceed the time-space boundaries comprehend the audience with a dream-like experience. Creating a dream-like experience is about resembling dreams in terms of structure, style and aesthetic. The purpose of this study is to examine the inner logic of dreams and determine which way a film should follow in order to provide a dream experience. In this context, firstly, the equivalence of the concepts of time and space, which undergo changes in dreams, in cinema is emphasized. After the relationship between film and dream experience is based on time and space, in order to shed light on the further stages, the relationship of dreams with reality and unreality is emphasized and the projection of this relationship in cinema is investigated. A reading attempt was made by analyzing the relationship between film and dream experience through Ömer Kavur's The Secret Face (1990) film, which has a unique dream language.

Logic of Dreams

Logic of Dreams

Introduction: In This World

Introduction: In This World

Jolted Images (Unbound Analytic) by Pavle Levi (review)

Reviewed by: Jolted Images (Unbound Analytic) by Pavle Levi Alex Brannan Levi, Pavle. Jolted Images (Unbound Analytic). Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 213 pages. The cover of Pavle Levi’s Jolted Images (Unbound Analytic) displays a panel from the comic “Survival” (Spunk no. 1, 1979). A man, his chest exposed to reveal an electrical socket imbedded in his left breast, lifts a cord that is dangling in front of him. He plugs the cord into his chest socket, and his eyes illuminate. His sense of sight becomes both a receiver and a projector of light. For Levi, the panel is a representation of the “syntotics of the future” (16)—syntotics being a therapeutic procedure utilizing colored lights to alleviate a variety of mental and physical ailments (13). Levi’s personal experience with syntotics as a child was, in a sense, his initiation into the space of cinematic exhibition. The “syntotics of the future,” he says, is an “adjust[ing] of the physiological basis of sight … that will enable the gaze to directly, immediately, affect its environment” (16). In this way, the cover image encapsulates the “jolted image” to which Levi refers. “Jolted image” is a term coined by Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev. To jolt an image is to make the spectator an active participant in a world not of their creation; they become lucid dreamers in the space of the art they are spectating (23). Jolted Images provides exposure to a variety of these jolted images, and in doing so casts a wide net over different artists, media, scholastic approaches, and national identities. This wide net divides the book into a series of disparate essays—Levi refers to them as “brisk and lively critical-theoretical reflections” (20)—which grapple with the effects of “jolting” art while also attempting to create jolted images of their own. Levi moves elusively through the works of several artists. He begins with Roman Polanski, of whom Levi once dreamed. In his dream state, Levi is convinced he has learned the “secret” to Polanski’s art, a secret that takes Levi much longer to discover in his waking life. This oneiric battle between wakefulness and dream states as it relates to artistic interpretation is to be Levi’s driving motif. He goes on to observe the encapsulation of Ingmar Bergman’s oneiric sequences as collaged by Makavejev; Miodrag Milošević’s re-framing of Bernardo Bertolucci Last Tango in Paris; and the “objective chance” intersections in the works of poet Vujica Rešin Tucić, artist Michael Snow, and filmmaker Slobodan Šijan. Levi’s chapters take on an oneiric form of their own, and this form manifests itself in one of two ways. In the first, the chapter will, as dreams often do, end abruptly without the usual conclusionary statement. “In lieu of a conclusion” at the end of the chapter on Milošević’s Last Tango in Paris, Levi presents a series of images that attempts to reconstruct Last Tango in Paris using both Bertolucci’s original and Milošević’s grainy alterations— Levi calls it a “cardiogram” (53). The conclusion of a later chapter states, against an otherwise blank page, “[s]o, can we orgasm” (71), indicating a relationship between the human body and the mechanical act of montage, between reality and cinema. The second form sees Levi’s printed thoughts taking on a visual quality not common to the literary form. Occasionally, Levi will interrupt the flow of words with “cuts” as they would be written into a shooting script, or he will insert parenthetical phrases and images in blue type. One chapter concludes with an emphatic image of the words “FADE OUT” followed by an erratic series of inter-connecting lines (109). Another presents the claim that HALLUCINATORY SUPERIMPOSITIONS ARE THE CINEMATIC INCUBATORS OF POLITICAL ENLIGHTENMENT. (127) Through these two oneiric forms of expression, which bend normative conceptions of both academic and literary writing, it seems Levi is using his analysis of jolted images in order to create jolted images of his own. In one sense, the dream logic that guides Levi’s jolted images, by leaving lines of analysis unresolved, creates a barrier between the reader and the works of art Levi...

Dream Logic: The Art of Ten Contemporary Surrealists

Dream Logic: The Art of Ten Contemporary Surrealists

Direction, Dreams, and Darkness

Direction, Dreams, and Darkness Brian Rhinehart (bio) Adrienne Kennedy's first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, was presented in a small black box theater called The East End Theatre in 1964, in New York City. Since then she has been continually lauded as one of the most important figures of American modernist theater. She's included in the ranks of playwrights like Baraka, Albee, and Shange, artists who radically altered the landscape of theater in the 1960s and 70s. Kennedy has always rejected traditional play structure, with its expository form and linear and chronological build to a climax and denouement. The logic of her plays is always more associative than cause/effect because her plays employ the logic of dreams: ephemeral and unpredictable. Her plots are nebulous, without the aggressive push of progressive action; her characters are often dis-unified and multi-determined. Her plays are hallucinatory, packed with memories and fragments of lives—hers and others. The plays that made her an American theater icon introduced theatergoers to a unique, highly subjective world, the surreal landscape of Kennedy's internal life. Rather than conventional realistic narratives, Kennedy uses resonant images to create powerful, deeply affecting dramas. Her plays are dark, spectral, and packed with memories and fragments of her life and those close to her. She constantly explores, confronts, and processes her own history, memories, dreams, recollections of thoughts, cultural inspirations, stories, and folk wisdom passed down for generations as well as deeply personal autobiographical details. In her newest play, He Brought Her Heart Home in a Box, which premiered at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, Kennedy once again explores her complicated relationship with the South (past and present), her family, and her own history. The play is set in rural Georgia in the 1940s, in the fictional town of Montefiore, Georgia, and a full layout of Montefiore in miniature greets each audience member upon entering the theater. The two protagonists, Kay, played by Juliana Canfield, and Chris, played by Tom Pecinka, meet backstage at a play, Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris(1953). They fall in love in this brief scene and are then separated by Chris leaving for New York City to become an actor. Both characters have white fathers who enjoy the pleasures of young black women. Kay is of mixed race. Chris's father is an architect and a Jim Crow segregationist, who designed the town to keep the races apart. A monumental hypocrite, he also built a cemetery and provided ornate headstones for the mothers of his illegitimate children. Kennedy puts a dummy representing Chris's father onstage throughout the play, thus keeping the presence of a racist Southern past (and present) onstage at all times. The mannequin stands up in the climax of the production, to execute the play's tragic conclusion. There is a notable change in both form and content regarding Kennedy's dramatic approach in her latest play. Not only is there a shift toward a more conventional dramaturgy (in the narrative's inexorable progression to its tragic climax), but there is also a slight shift away from the strict interiority of her earlier plays, like Funnyhouse of a Negro(1964) and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), to a wider, more directly historical and political critique of race relations in America. In her New York Times interview in January 2018, she talks about her move to Virginia (six years ago) after living for so many years on the upper west side of Manhattan. She went there and felt, saw, and heard the same anti-black aggression that she had felt in the 1940s. In Virginia today, racial tension still runs high, as she openly states in her interview: "They seem to glorify slavery…. They have all these pageants. They really do seem to glorify that time." One of the ways that Kennedy directly expresses her critique of the South then and now is in the hopelessness of the central couple's romantic situation. They can never be together because of the restrictions on mixed-race couples in the 1940s. The mélange of cultural allusions that Kennedy employs to reiterate and reinforce this...

Transforming the Commonplace through Machine Perception: Light Field Synthesis and Audio Feature Extraction in the Rover Project

Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening, it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still-life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid form between photography and cinema. This paper describes the mechatronic, machine perception, and audio-visual synthesis techniques developed for the piece.

Gender as Trauma in Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929)

Gender as Trauma in Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929) Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez (bio) In his text "Cinema, Instrument of Poetry" (1953), Luis Buñuel encapsulates his view on the function of the filmmaker in a quotation by Friedrich Engel's, which he appropriates: The novelist [or filmmaker] will have accomplished his task honour-ably when, through a faithful depiction of authentic social relations, he will have destroyed the conventional representations of the nature of these relations, shaken the optimism of the bourgeois world and obliged the reader to question the permanence of the existing order, even if he does not directly propose a conclusion to us, even if he does not openly take sides.1 It is my contention that this is precisely what Un chien andalou (1929) sets out to do with regards to gender. Its poetic, surrealist, oft en dream-like nature allows for—even encourages—various readings and layers of interpretation, which coexist with one another. This article argues that, in line with the intention expressed above, one of the functions of this film is to identify and depict social assumptions and attitudes toward gender, to challenge their conventional representation, and to question the permanence of the existing gender relationships and roles at the time the film was produced. Although a black and white, silent film only seventeen minutes long, Un chien andalou remains one of the most influential and celebrated short [End Page 41] films in the history of cinema. Co-written and directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí,2 released in Paris in 1929, the film became a sudden and unexpected success that secured their admittance into the French surrealist circle lead by André Breton. The nonsensical and fragmented storyline, or lack thereof, the mise-en-scéne (created by Dalí) bursting with sym-bolism, the unconventional appearances of characters, the disorienting intertitles, the incoherent representation of time and space, and the clever use of montage come together to create an oneiric atmosphere that invites ambiguity and defies the neatness of a single unequivocal interpretation. Deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, here I contend that Un chien andalou is largely an exploration of trauma. In his preface to the publication of the script for Un chien andalou, Buñuel expresses his adherence to "surrealist thought and activity"3 in a reference to Breton's 1924 First Surrealist Manifesto.4 This manifesto aimed for nothing less than expressing "the actual functioning of thought,"5 which he hoped to accomplish by challenging and destabilizing reason so as to access the contents of the subconscious mind. Not in vain, Andrew Webber describes Un chien andalou as "psychically driven."6 Not only is Un chien andalou arguably filled with disturbing, sometimes even violent and traumatic images (the slicing of a woman's eye, crawling insects, decomposing animals, etc.); more radically than that, the lack of temporal coherence and of spatial structure as well as its fragmented narrative (interspersion of apparently disconnected shots and the lack of a coherent resolution to the action) reminiscent of the logic of dreams all mirror the fragmented identity and fragmented discourse associated with the traumatized self. Thus, the connection between Buñuel's early take on cinema and the subconscious, and by extension trauma, comes to light.7 By opening the doors into the subconscious, surrealist cinema, and Un chien andalou in particular, not only grants us a glimpse into our repressed impulses and desires, but it also becomes a suitable vehicle to expose and express trauma by, first, identifying those traumas that have been confined to the subconscious and, second, by expressing them through the use of moving images and sound in a way that surpasses the limits of common language and everyday reality. That is to say that avant-garde surrealist cinema provides an outlet for the articulation of trauma in a language that is kindred to the language of its native environment, the subconscious. [End Page 42] It is the trauma produced by an overly rational society that leads surrealists to question the place and value of rationality, and to search for alternative forms of expression and thought. Let's not forget that Surrealism itself is deeply rooted...

Swapnaushadhi: the embedded logic of dreams and medical innovation in Bengal.

Numerous medicines in South Asia have their origins in dreams. Deities, saints and other supernatural beings frequently appear in dreams to instruct dreamers about specific remedies, therapeutic techniques, modes of care etc. These therapies challenge available models of historicising dreams. Once we overcome these challenges and unearth the embedded logic of these dreams, we begin to discern in them a dynamic institution that enabled and sustained therapeutic change within a 'traditional' medical milieu.