E-grāmata: Envisioning the Dream Through Art and Science [Taylor & Francis e-book]

A collection of 100 digitally imaged dreams contributed by artists, who also completed personality questionnaires. Correlations between visual aspects of he digitized dreams and personality traits of the artists point to relationships observable in the digitized dreams but not discoverable in artists' verbal descriptions of those dreams.

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.

Kunzendorf, professor of psychology, and Veatch, professor of art (both at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell), team up in this interdisciplinary experiment on dream imagery, offering digital images created by 100 art students based on their own dreams. An essay by Veatch looks at surrealism, archetypal manifestations of subconscious impulses, and the use of collage. An essay by Kunzendorf looks at the connections between emotions, psychopathology, and the visual content of dreams. The bulk of the book (200 pages) is comprised of facing-page entries. The left-side page contains the artist's description of his/her dream and his/her interpretations of the dream, as well as each student's scores from two psychopathology scoring instruments: the Short Form of the Boundary Questionnaire, and the Brief Symptom Inventory. The right-side page presents six small-format photo and art images depicting the dream (most in color). Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)