Dream Scene Research Articles

Consciousness in non-REM-parasomnia episodes.

Sleepwalking and related parasomnias are thought to result from incomplete awakenings out of non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. Non-REM parasomnia behaviours have been described as unconscious and automatic, or related to vivid, dream-like conscious experiences. Similarly, some observations have suggested that patients are unresponsive during episodes, while others that they can interact with their surroundings. To better grasp and characterise the full spectrum of consciousness and environmental (dis)connection associated with behavioural episodes, 35 adult patients with non-REM sleep parasomnias were interviewed in-depth about their experiences. The level of consciousness during parasomnia episodes was reported to be variable both within and between individuals, ranging from minimal or absent consciousness and largely automatic behaviours (frequently/always present in 36% of patients) to preserved conscious experiences characterised by delusional thinking to varying degrees of specificity (65%), often about impending danger, variably formed, uni- or multisensory hallucinations (53%), impaired insight (77%), negative emotions (75%), and variable, but often pronounced, amnesia (30%). Patients described their experiences as a dream scene during which they felt awake ("awake dreaming"). The surroundings were either realistically perceived, misinterpreted (in the form of perceptual illusions or misidentifications of people), or entirely hallucinated as a function of the prevailing delusion. These observations suggest that the level of consciousness, amnesiaand sensory disconnection during non-REM parasomnia episodes is variable and graded. In their full-fledged expression, non-REM parasomnia experiences feature several core features of dreams. They therefore represent a valuable model for the study of consciousness, sleep-related sensory disconnection and dreaming.

Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith's Autumn

Abstract Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that can be read as intergenerational desire. The experimental narratives and reflections on the fluidity of age enable Smith and Jones to evoke this controversial topic without fulling addressing it. A lot is at stake for Fire and Hemlock, given that it is addressed to young readers and there is concern that children's books could be used for grooming. Controversially, both novels locate the desire in the young girl rather than the old man and explore the agency and moments of disempowerment that the female characters experience. However, an age gap between childhood and adulthood is crucial in qualifying a relationship as “intergenerational desire,” and here, the novels’ experimental structures and fuzzy chronologies create ambiguity. In addition, the books create confusion about the nature of the attraction between the characters. They exploit the ambiguity that incomplete memories, unreliable narration, narrative gaps, metaphors, and intertextual references leave when thematizing what could be defined as friendship, kinship, love, and/or sexual attraction.

Analyzing monstrous maternal in “Jendela” and “A Mother’s Love” interior mise-en-scene

Background: The storytelling and narrative approaches surpassed the study of the interior and cinematic by the idea of staging. In film production, the use of interior elements to aid storytelling is called interior mise-en-scene. However, more research still needs to be done on how spatial metaphors in the interior mise-en-scene are explored. The spatial metaphor is central to creating atmosphere and setting based on film narratives. Therefore, this article examines a spatial metaphor in the horror film mise-en-scene, focusing on monstrous maternity. The case studies are the film ‘A Mother’s love’ (Joko Anwar, Indonesia) and ‘Jendela’ (M. Subash Abdullah, Malaysia). Both films portray the woman protagonist as a psychotic character who haunts their own house. Purpose: The article aims to find spatial metaphors to represent the idea of monstrous maternal as a horror motif. Methods: Through qualitative and literature review, the element of the interior mise-en-scene and abjection theory has been analyzed to find meaning in spatial language. Results: As a result, the spatial metaphor in the film portrays the idea of topo analysis- the topography of the intimate being in the house. Many spaces are composed in dream scene situation, and the use of liminal space become central to supernatural narratives. A distorted play camera frames the space, engaging the audience to enter the character’s mind. Implications: This research contributes to how spatial metaphor in film can aid storytelling in interior design. The interior mise-en-scene helps the designer translate the narrative’s text into a spatial dimension through the staging technique.

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Németh Antal Tragédia-rendezésének utópia-képei

Németh Antal as a director reckoned the most exciting to direct dramas which were not written with a special purpose to be presented on stage. He said he had learnt the most during directing The Tragedy of Man about how the “plays of fancy” and the sphere of dreams could be set to the stage. In Németh’s experiments with different stage techniques those cases posed the biggest challenge where he had to exonerate the heavy materiality of the scenery. Such challenges were the staging of dream scenes and transcendent phenomena (e. g. ghosts) as well as the assisting of human internal discourse and struggle with different stage effects. This study attempts to reconstruct first of all the expressionist style of his directing from 1937.

Self-disclosure and the ‘staging’ of autonomy in installation art

ABSTRACT The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the ‘immersiveness’ of contemporary installations or assemblages. These are described as ‘staged’ precisely because they utilise overt scenographic strategies. Claire Bishop, for instance, employs the symbolically charged term ‘dream scene’ to characterise a mode of installation resembling an abandoned theatre set, where psychological absorption is achieved through physical immersion. For Bishop, this characterises the ‘total’ installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. But might we understand ‘staging’ not merely as scenography (even in its expanded sense) but as a ‘bracketing’ of the represented world in such a way as to reveal its fictionality through self-disclosure? Drawing upon (1) Juliane Rebentisch’s critique of the spatial time of theatrical installation, and (2) Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, I consider the ‘staging’ of autonomy in relation to a work exemplary of Bishop’s ‘dream scene’: Mike Nelson’s Mirror Infill (2006). I will explore how its particular form of self-disclosure counters misconceptions of such ‘immersive’ work as context-independent and reveal how Nelson’s work makes available something absent (undisclosed) through representation conceived not as mimesis, but as a performative act.

INTERIOR MISE-EN SCENE IN ASIAN HORROR FILM’S SETTINGS

Interior design is a process of conditioning a specific atmosphere, which relates to the concept of 'staging space.' As interior design is inherently designed to create an illusory world, the 'illusive, simulative' space can be used interchangeably with the real-imagined space of interior design and cinema. This article will examine three horror films to focus on how interior mise-en-scene is used to create a horror atmosphere. The films A Mother's Love, Tatami, and POB embodied semantic meanings into their spatial settings, serving as a projection of the characters; psyche, and story plots. A rhetorical visual method is used to interpret the relationship between spatial language, camera angle, character, and story plot. The research discovers that spatial language is an instrument of terror, as repeated patterns of liminal space, backlighting lights, and dream scene metaphors enhance the properties and camera angles to elicit an emotion of horror.

Partial memory reinstatement while (lucid) dreaming to change the dream environment.

Lucid dreams often coincide with having control over dream events in real-time, although the limitations of dream control are not completely understood. The current study probed the ability of lucid dreamers to reinstate waking scene memories while dreaming. After brief exposure to an experimental scene, participants were asked to reinstate the scene while lucid dreaming (i.e., change dream scenery to match real-world scene). Qualitative analysis revealed that successful dream scene reinstatements were overwhelmingly inaccurate with respect to the original experimental scene. Importantly, reinstatement inaccuracies held even when the dreamer was aware of them during the dream, suggesting a dissociation between memory access while dreaming and dream imagery. The ability to change the environment of a dream speaks to the high amount of lucid dream control, yet the inaccuracies speak to a lack of detailed control. Reinstating context during lucid sleep offers an experimental method to investigate sleep, dreams, and memory.

My Dream, My Rules: Can Lucid Dreaming Treat Nightmares?

Nightmares are defined as repeated occurrences of extremely dysphoric and well-remembered dreams that usually involve subjective threats to survival, security, or physical integrity. Generally, they occur during rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) and lead to awakenings with distress and insufficient overnight sleep. Nightmares may occur spontaneously (idiopathic) or as recurrent nightmares. Recurrent nightmares cause significant distress and impairment in occupational and social functioning, as have been commonly observed in post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. By contrast, during lucid dreaming (LD), subjects get insight they are dreaming and may even control the content of their dreams. These features may open a way to help those who suffer from nightmare disorder through re-significations of the dream scene, i.e., knowing that they are dreaming and having control over their dream content. Thus, lucid dreamers might be able to render nightmares normal dreams, thereby assuring a restoring sleep. The aim of the present study is to review the existing literature of the use of LD as an auxiliary tool for treatment of nightmares. We conducted a careful literature search for eligible studies on the use of LD treatment for nightmares. We observed that whereas LD may be a feasible aid in the treatment of patients with nightmares through minimizing their frequency, intensity and psychological distress, the available literature is still scarce and does not provide consistent results. We conclude therefore that more research is clearly warranted for a better estimation of the effective conductance and therapeutic outcome of LD treatment in clinical practice.

The ‘Dream Scene’: Exploring Participatory Socially Engaged Art Practices through Arts‐Based Educational Research

AbstractIn this article, I explore ‘the dream scene’, a mode of installation art described by art critic and art historian Claire Bishop to demonstrate how artistic practice can provoke participation and social engagement. I will focus on a concept entitled ‘the crypt’ that emerged in my doctoral research, and one that I continued to explore in a novel way in a collaborative event at Tate Exchange, in Liverpool, UK in March 2018. It is my intention that ‘the crypt’ can provide an example of what ‘a dream scene’ can look like and, more importantly, what a dream scene can do. Finally, I will attend to some of the implications that this type of engagement has for arts‐based educational research.

The Real Cost: Alaska's innovative media campaign to raise awareness about the direct and indirect costs of smoking to society.

Smoking incurs heavy financial costs for direct medical expenditures and lost productivity related to premature death. The Alaska Tobacco Prevention and Control Program designed a media campaign called 'The Real Cost' to raise awareness of the economic cost of smoking to all Alaskans, regardless of their smoking status. The campaign presented this information through television and radio ads between December 2012 and March 2013. The first ad, 'Dream Scene', focused on overall cost of smoking to Alaska. The second ad, 'Oil Change', focused on lost productivity. We conducted three cross-sectional telephone surveys, one prior to the campaign and one after each ad was run to assess changes in beliefs associated with the main campaign messages. At Survey 2, we observed increased adjusted odds of agreement with the main campaign message, 'I am affected financially by other people's smoking' (adjusted odds ratio = 4.5, 95% confidence interval = 3.0-6.7). At Survey 3, we observed elevated adjusted odds of agreement for beliefs related to all campaign messages. This campaign was successful in raising knowledge and awareness of the cost of smoking on a societal level among adult, nonsmoking residents of Alaska.

This Fearful Object of Desire: On the Interpretation of a Bad Dream in Wang Shifu’s Story of the Western WingGlossary

‪Le reve de Zhang Sheng, a la fin du quatrieme livre du zaju des Yuan Le Pavillon de l’ouest (Xixiang ji), de Wang Shifu, est rarement etudie. Il concentre pourtant des informations essentielles sur le rapport du heros et de l’heroine et ses contradictions, dans ce qui constitue la reference cardinale de l’imaginaire amoureux a l’epoque premoderne, dans les derniers siecles de l’empire. Cette scene de reve est le fruit de toute une histoire textuelle, et exercera une influence durable sur d’autres textes. L’interpretation qu’en fait Jin Shengtan, qui peut se deceler a travers son edition de la piece, au xvii e siecle, est parfaitement compatible avec une lecture moderne telle qu’on peut la faire a partir de Jacques Lacan, avec sa theorie du desir, du sujet et de l’Autre.‪

The Quotative in Bashkir

Evidentiality is a widely researched category in contemporary linguistics, both from the viewpoint of grammatical expression and also that of semantics/pragmatics. Amongst markers expressing information source is the illocutionary evidential quotative, which codes a speech report with an explicit reference to the quoted source. This article investigates the quotative particle tip in Bashkir, a Kipchak-Bulgar Turkic language spoken in the Russian Federation. In its default quotative meaning, tip signals direct speech and functions as a syntactic complementiser. This function was found to have extended from spoken utterances to coding thoughts and experiences in the context of semi-direct speech. A separate function of tip is its use as an adverbialiser signalling a logical relation and conveying the meaning of intention/purpose.
 Different categories were found to interact in the functions of tip. In the context of semi-direct speech, the meaning tip conveys is linked with the semantic dimension of subjectivity, which pertains to the cognitive processing and expressing of information by the speaker/experiencer. The interplay of the marker tip was investigated in conjunction with ten complement-taking verbs, whose degree and strength of subjectivity were found to range from neutral to strong. When combined with küreü ‘see’, tip introduces visual ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty, for example, in dream scenes. With the verbs beleü ‘know’ and išeteü ‘hear’, tip conveys a multisubjective meaning: in addition to signalling what the experiential subject has heard or found out, the marker also codes the involvement of some other subject, the original source, thus giving voice to multiple speakers and merging them.

Homer and the Poetics of Hades by George Alexander Gazis

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 363 Homer and the Poetics of Hades. By George Alexander Gazis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. xi, 253. George Alexander Gazis's book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the ancient Greek Underworld. It is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at Durham University and consists of seven chapters organized in two parts. Through close readings of most Homeric passages pertaining to Hades, Gazis looks within the tradition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to identify a poetics unique to Hades, governed by its impenetrable darkness and informed by the experience of heroic afterlife. Gazis introduces opposing pairs, such as Muses/Hades and light/darkness, as structural elements of this poetics and argues that Hades, as a poetic domain inaccessible to the Muses and to all Olympian gods, provides an alternative context where “the mainstream epic tradition can be discussed, re-evaluated, and recast as the shades of the dead reflect upon their story and relate to us their own very personal experience of the epic past” (13). The Introduction offers a comprehensive overview of the concept of Homeric enargeia in ancient and modern scholarship. This thorough presentation of Homeric vividness and its incompatibility with darkness also serves as a theoretical basis for the subsequent discussion of the invisibility of Hades, on which Gazis places special emphasis. After connecting the Homeric narrative about the cap of Hades (Il. 5.844–845) and the etymology of Hades as A-idēs to poetic attestations of the utter isolation of the Underworld, the author proceeds to explore Hades’ presence in the Iliad. In Part 1, Chapter One argues that the Iliad, despite its focus on light and brightness, keeps Hades in the background as a prerequisite to kleos. Nevertheless, Hades’ associations with glory are notably absent from Patroclus’ address to Achilles during the latter’s dream in Il. 23.59–107, which is discussed in Chapter Two. Gazis reads the dream scene as a poetic (and metapoetic) statement on the relationship between the two heroes as they interact for the last time in the Iliad, asserting that their conversation “across the divide of the living and the dead” (48) allows internal and external audiences of the Iliad a precious glimpse into Achilles’ acceptance of his own mortality through the death of his nearest and dearest. According to Gazis, this acceptance also entails a distinct reformulation of the heroic experience, centered on emotion and detached from warlike splendor. Part 2, Chapters Three to Seven, delves into the Odyssean Underworld, viewing it as a space where conventional poetic vision, traditionally granted by the Muses, is no longer acting as a source of bardic inspiration. Gazis’s argument for a poetics of Hades is made most compellingly here as he explores the “experimentation with voice and genre which is made possible by the Underworld setting of Odyssey 11” (83), as well as the performative possibilities of Hades. As a poetic resource, the Underworld has a liberating effect on both context and content, giving the poet the freedom to experiment with un-epic sentiments and lyric overtones evoking Sappho or Stesichorus. Gazis revisits all of Odysseus’ encounters in the Nekyia against the backdrop of an antagonism between a poetics of vividness, portraying the world of the living, and “a poetics of darkness, which favours inwardness and personal experience” (102). This tension is illustrated in the death narratives of Elpenor (102–108) and Agamemnon (167–181), where the shade’s perspective comes into stark contrast with the version provided by an external source. The author skillfully demonstrates that this contrast evolves into a powerful display of personal feelings in the “Catalogue of Heroines” and into passionate 364 PHOENIX revisionism in the “Catalogue of Heroes,” examined in Chapters Five and Seven respectively . Chapter Five offers an in-depth analysis of the stories of the fourteen heroines Odysseus meets after the encounter with his mother. By diligently juxtaposing the hero’s eyewitness account with the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and other traditions, Gazis explicates how the poetics of Hades enables the characters to supply only the information that completes their profiles as they wish to construct them, according to their...

"In Sondry Forms": Dreams and Truth in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

The desire to understand a literary text often translates into a desire to neatly categorize meaning; and by consequence, to flatten the complexity of the work through oversimplification. This is true for both casual readers and literary critics—and, as demonstrated in this paper, for interpreters of dream visions. Yet some elusive texts slip out of reach, instead mystifying and elevating the literary genre. Geoffrey Chaucer's work Troilus and Criseyde, an exquisite retelling of the Troy myth, subverts the formal employment of dream visions common to medieval writing. This paper attempts to illuminate the genius of the two major dream scenes in this work through the analytic frameworks of Stephen Kruger and Valerie Ross. To offer a more comprehensive picture of Chaucer’s career, this paper also explores how he incorporates dreams in other key works. By way of this investigation, I find that the natural obscurities surrounding unconscious dreamspace allows Chaucer to access—and challenge—readers' conceptions of narrative epistemology, thereby achieving both authorial agency and critical liberation. Understanding Chaucer's stylistic legacy within his oeuvre and the larger English canon grants unique insight to even a contemporary reader’s personal relationship to liminality.

Phenomenal consciousness in dreams and in mind wandering

Dreaming can be explained as the product of an interaction among memory processes, elaborative processes, and phenomenal awareness. A feedback circuit is activated by this interaction according to the associative links and the requirements of the dream scene. Recently, it has been hypothesized that a partial similarity exists between dreaming and mind wandering and that these two processes may involve the same neural default network. This commentary discusses the differences and similarities between phenomenal consciousness during dreaming and phenomenal consciousness during mind wandering from the perspective of the “continuity” of engagement of cognitive systems. The greatest difference consists in the lack of reality testing during dreaming. Dream imagery is hallucinatory by nature. Consequently, the simulated world in dreams makes dream imagery more akin to perception. In contrast, the imagery of mind wandering is more similar to imagination. The level of meta-awareness is preserved more frequently and to a greater degree in mind wandering.

Eyes dart about a dream scene in REM sleep

One's body may be still, but as he dreams, his eyes can flicker manically. The rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep is when one has the most vivid dreams. Some evidence comes from a previous study that monitored the sleep of people who have a disorder that means they often physically act out their dreams. Their eye movements matched their actions around 80 percent of the time--a man dreaming about smoking, for example, appeared to look at a dream ashtray as he put out a cigarette. But most of the REM sleep these people had was not accompanied by body movements, making it hard to know for sure. To investigate further, Yuval Nir at Tel Aviv University and his colleagues monitored people who have epilepsy and have electrodes implanted deep into their brains to help with treatment. These electrodes were mostly in a region that responds strongly to pictures, and allowed the team to record the activity from around 40 neurons in each volunteer's brain as they slept. They found that activity seemed to spike around a quarter of a second after an eye flicker, just as it does after seeing an image when awake.

Dreams in Films and Films as Dreams: Surrealism and Popular American Cinema

Les films ayant recours à des séquences de rêves étaient particulièrement nombreux au cours de la période transitoire. Dès 1915, ces films connurent une baisse de régime considérable avant de redevenir plus nombreux à partir de la fin des années 1930, et ce, grâce à la popularisation de la psychanalyse. Dans le cinéma classique hollywoodien, les composantes du langage cinématographique furent mises en avant dans le but de rendre compte de l’étrangeté des rêves et leurs écarts par rapport à la « réalité » de la diégèse des films. Les surréalistes subvertissaient le style réaliste classique en faisant des rêves le modèle de leur « réalité », et cette subversion fut mise en pratique dans les quelques films qu’ils avaient réalisés. Surréalistes et classiques hollywoodiens s’approprièrent la psychanalyse freudienne dans leurs approches des rêves ; cependant ces appropriations divergeaient radicalement. Un examen des séquences oniriques dans des comédies musicales permettra d’éclairer le débat sur la distinction entre les rêves dans les films et les films oniriques.

Such stuff as dreams are made on? Elaborative encoding, the ancient art of memory, and the hippocampus

This article argues that rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming is elaborative encoding for episodic memories. Elaborative encoding in REM can, at least partially, be understood through ancient art of memory (AAOM) principles: visualization, bizarre association, organization, narration, embodiment, and location. These principles render recent memories more distinctive through novel and meaningful association with emotionally salient, remote memories. The AAOM optimizes memory performance, suggesting that its principles may predict aspects of how episodic memory is configured in the brain. Integration and segregation are fundamental organizing principles in the cerebral cortex. Episodic memory networks interconnect profusely within the cortex, creating omnidirectional "landmark" junctions. Memories may be integrated at junctions but segregated along connecting network paths that meet at junctions. Episodic junctions may be instantiated during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep after hippocampal associational function during REM dreams. Hippocampal association involves relating, binding, and integrating episodic memories into a mnemonic compositional whole. This often bizarre, composite image has not been present to the senses; it is not "real" because it hyperassociates several memories. During REM sleep, on the phenomenological level, this composite image is experienced as a dream scene. A dream scene may be instantiated as omnidirectional neocortical junction and retained by the hippocampus as an index. On episodic memory retrieval, an external stimulus (or an internal representation) is matched by the hippocampus against its indices. One or more indices then reference the relevant neocortical junctions from which episodic memories can be retrieved. Episodic junctions reach a processing (rather than conscious) level during normal wake to enable retrieval. If this hypothesis is correct, the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory.