Optimus2g

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I feel both a sense of apprehension and excitement in anticipation of this fast approaching conference, which is only 2 days away. I feel more prepared due to the amount of work that we've put into this, both contenet-wise and stylistically. The group presentation work which we worked on at the begining of the year (way back in the Fall) will now benefit us immensely for this conference. The key is getting the jitters out, which the rehearsal will hopefully do tomorrow.

Personally, I feel that my student teaching experience has prepared me for the role of Moderator extremely well because I am now more familiar with speaking in front of large groups of students (about 60 per day). I researched the work of the 5 speakers that I will introduce and have prepared a brief introductory speech as well (SEE THE DOWNLOADABLE LINK ON TOP OF THE PAGE OR THE TEXT AT THE BOTTOM). I encourage anyone with suggestions for me to post them here, after reading my prepared introductory speech for Roundtable #2-Words & Pictures: Representing the Elusive Dream. Thank you and best wishes to everyone in performing their given part for the conference on Wednesday.

“Dreams are very elusive. It is as if they are aware that they don’t belong to the realm of waking consciousness and are eager to get back into the darkness from whence they came […] Temporal sequences seem jumbled and juxtaposed in strange ways” (26). –Appreciating Dreams by Montague Ullman (Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University)

This quote demonstrates the difficulty of capturing dreams in words or pictures. Their amorphous nature has captured the imaginations of people the world over. Theorists, authors, artists, and film makers have all thrown their figurative hats into the ring of dream theory.

Each of our speakers will address the question of how dreams are represented with respect to differing visual mediums. Tina Ramos will discuss our blogs, which we have been working on as a class since the end of August of last year until now. They reflect our class’s attempts at capturing the elusive feeling of describing our dreams and their subsequent effects on our waking lives. They range from the absurd to the heart wrenching and the solemn to the comical. Why this variation you may ask? The answer lies within the plastic nature of our dreams themselves which provides the spark for these types of dreams in the first place.

Doreen Deignan has explored this concept in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled. Ishiguro has found a new way to use dreams to create an environment that is both disorienting and familiar. His writing in the "language of Dreams" is the glue that links the form and the content in his novel. The world which Ishiguro has created is one in which the writer’s imagination converges with a setting that is as surreal as it is recognizable, turning the reader’s conception of what is real and what isn’t upside down in the process.

Caroline Yu has focused upon the surrealistic art of Salvador Dali, which is directly influenced by Sigmund Freud and aims to represent the hidden desires which are encoded in dreams. Dali’s stated desire "to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality" made him an instant star among the Surrealists, until he proved to be too surreal even for their tastes. This, likewise, aims to capture the hazy sensation of dreaming that teeters on the brink of reality and the fantastic.

Melissa Chen has focused her effort on describing how the contemporary medium of anime is dramatizing Japanese cultural and historical ideas about dreams on the screen. She discusses how one specific aspect of anime reflects the current conflicting approaches to dream theory—that is the “interpretive” and “scientific” approaches. She discusses how the interpretive approach is more “spiritual” in nature and compares this to the scientific approach which is seen as being the result of material causes.

Maria Hartolfilis discusses how film makers, such as Ingmar Bergman, have used the film making medium to portray dreams as being more concrete and less tactile. She discusses the long tradition of filmmakers incorporating psychological elements when constructing their films so that their audiences may gain deeper insight into their own innermost feelings and desires.

We all can learn more about the elusive concept of dreams by understanding how each of these respective mediums functions with respect to capturing something, which by its very definition is nebulous and fluid. By themselves, these mediums may not make the case for representing dreams in a more concrete fashion, however taken as a whole they can teach us more about the very nature of dreams themselves, but our own individual psyches as well in the process. We welcome you to explore these ideas with us…