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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 2

The prize for this year’s Best Animation Style went to Daniele Grosso for “The Bird Insect Tornado.”

Here is Daniele’s description of the dream that inspired the film:

“I am at a picnic on the bank of a river with some friends. I notice a flock of pinkish colored bird insects flying around a tree. I start to film them, and the flock makes a beautiful movement in the air. Their movement suddenly becomes a tornado. We pick up our things and run towards some ruins where I think we can take refuge.”

The film uses sophisticated computer-generated imagery to bring us into a three-dimensional world populated by tiny bubbles endlessly morphing in and out of various shapes and forms. Linda Koncz, the festival administrator, said this of Daniele’s work:

“The entire visuality is built on bubbles, which makes me feel as though I’m underwater, in the subconscious, and the sounds of children laughing and wind add to the dreamlike atmosphere. Each frame built of bubbles is being blown away by the wind to create the next frame, just as in dreams, the connectedness of the parts is not linear, the story fragments connect in a free associative way, like a light wave of wind…(and then gets forgotten like a mandala blown away:)”

This year’s festival asked participants to consider dreams in relation to nature and the environment, and Daniele’s film achieves this by portraying the ever-changing dynamics of human interactions with other animate creatures and with the inanimate forces of nature. The bird-insects represent one kind of unusual merging and metamorphosis; the change of the bird-insects into a tornado represents an even more dramatic transformation. The trajectory of the dream suggests we humans may find these changes increasingly unfavorable to our peace and tranquility.

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2025 Dream Animation Film Festival 1

The prize for this year’s “Best Animation Narrative” went to Jessie Rodriguez for “Dreams – A Memory of Ghosts.”

 

This is how Jessie describes her work, which all the judges of the festival agreed is an outstanding piece of dream creativity:

“My new animation, ‘Dreams: a Memory of Ghosts,’ explores how I seem to remember my dreams in fragments, little pieces that are still with me when I wake up. Seeing the theme of climate change, I focused on bringing to life the dreams I had around animals and the earth. I have chosen an animation style of an early silent film, with intertitles as a throw back to early cinema. In this animation I have it split into three Acts, each one came from a dream. The dreams I animated all came to life from February-March of this year when I was recording them.

  • Act 1-the Council: I look through the bushes and see a procession of animals who don’t know I am there, who seem to be having a secret meeting. They turn and look at me.
  • Act 2-Cat Boxes: A house has towers of covered plastic bins going up a hundred feet in the air. They start to fall down and cats emerge from all of them. I catch some bins unsure if I should let the cats out or keep the lid on.
  • Act 3-Premium Death Package: There is an old woman sitting by her future grave. She has purchased the premium death package that allows for up to $300,000 worth of classes each year she can take once she is dead. She eagerly awaits her descent into the grave.

To share with you a little about my process, I make all of my work and films completely by hand. I work out of Denver, Colorado in the United States. My stop motion animations are created from linocut printmaking. The techniques used to make these films involve creating every visual element from scratch. Characters, textures, background and text are made by hand carving each piece out of linoleum, hand printing onto paper and then cutting out, arranging and shooting frame by frame. I employ multi-plane and other experimental techniques for each animation. I love being able to bring my ideas to life through small-scale filmmaking, and am inspired by other filmmakers who used this process such as Lotte Reininger who worked entirely with shadows and cut paper.”

Speaking for myself (and not necessarily all the other festival judges), I was completely enchanted by the oneiric atmosphere Jessie creates in her work. The retro aesthetic—hand-crafted stop-motion in an old silent film format—generated for me a very dreamy and pleasantly uncanny feeling of open imagination and an awareness that the dynamism of the past is still a living presence today. The three-dream structure invites interpretive reflections on the symbolic and emotional interplay between the separate acts of the film. Each of the three dreams touches on the festival’s theme of nature and the environment, and each one expresses some special insight about the natural world, some little koan of ecological wisdom. Thank you, Jessie!

And thanks to Linda Koncz for administering the festival and the Elsewhere.to team–Gez Quinn, Kat Juncker, Dan Kennedy, and Victoria Philibert–for their support at all stages of the process.

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Reflections on An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming (1997)

Early in my career, I had attitude about writing “secondary” texts. I didn’t want to write about what other people thought, I wanted to write about my own ideas. That’s why when the opportunity arose to write a book intended as an introductory textbook for college students, I hesitated. The offer came by way of Sybe Terwee, a psychoanalytic philosopher from the Netherlands who had recently co-hosted the 1994 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden. Sybe had been contacted by Greenwood/Praeger, an American publisher with a large psychology catalog, asking him if he would be interested in writing an introductory text on dream psychology. He was unable to do so, but he suggested me as an alternative, and put them in touch with me. This was a big thrill for a young scholar, and I wanted to show Sybe I was worthy of his trust.

But…there was the secondary text issue. The change of mind and heart came when I recognized the creative opportunities in writing an overview of the history of modern dream psychology. As I looked at other versions of this history, and there were not many, I became increasingly confident that I could write a good, clear, multidisciplinary version of this story, whether or not it amounted to a secondary text. And then, once I got going, it was a very quick writing process. I’d say it took ten years of continuous study to be able to write the book in about three months.

As a way of orienting myself within the tremendous breadth and diversity of the field, and thus being able to explain its contours in clear terms to students new to this subject, I settled on three basic questions that I would ask at each new point in the story:

  1. How are dreams formed?
  2. What function or functions do dreams serve?
  3. Can dreams be interpreted?

These three questions give the book a tight analytic structure that makes it easy to compare similarities and differences among the various theories. To illustrate how the three questions are used going forward, I apply them in the Introduction to the ancient dream teachings found in the Bible, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the Oneirocriticon of Artemidorus. I’m trying to give readers a sense of how many of the ideas and theories of modern dream psychology did not appear out of the blue but have deep roots in the Western cultural tradition.

The order of chapters follows a by-now conventional chronology, starting with the dream theories of Sigmund Freud, then Carl Jung, then branching out into different versions of psychoanalytic psychology with a clinical focus (Alfred Adler, Medford Boss, Thomas French and Erika Fromm, Frederick Perls). Next are chapters about the findings of sleep laboratory researchers like Eugene Aserinsky, Nathaniel Kleitman, and J. Allan Hobson, and experimental psychologists like Jean Piaget, Calvin Hall, David Foulkes, Harry Hunt, and Ernest Hartmann. The last chapter is titled “Popular Psychology: Bringing Dreams to the Masses,” which chronicles the contributions of people who, beginning in the 1960’s and 1970’s, expanded the horizons of dream psychology both in the way they practiced dream interpretation (in group settings, not just in psychiatric sessions or sleep labs) and in the dreamers they included (all people in all cultures, not just Western therapy patients). This chapter profiled the work of Ann Faraday, Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney, Jeremy Taylor, Montague Ullman, Stephen LaBerge, and ends with the “Senoi Debate” between Kilton Stewart and G. William Domhoff.

The cover was entirely out of my hands. It’s fine, I’ve come to like the blue-to-indigo colors and the cloudy sky imagery, it’s all rather trippy. We persuaded two eminent sleep laboratory researchers, Ernest Hartmann and Wilse Webb, to write back-cover endorsements. Hartmann and Webb were both in the first generation of psychologists who studied how the new findings about REM and NREM sleep relate to psychoanalytic insights about the nature of dreaming. If they were happy with the book, then mission accomplished.

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Interpreting Dreams with AI-Generated Imagery

The image-generating power of new AI systems has huge untapped potential for the practice of dream interpretation—and some potential downsides. Even more than AI interpretive texts, the dramatic power of AI interpretive images may open new vistas for exploring the meanings of dreams.

The Value of Dream-Sharing

The difficulty most of us have in understanding our dreams is not because they are random nonsense but because dreams express our unconscious sense of open-ended possibility. Almost by definition, dreaming goes beyond the limits of our waking ego to consider new angles and alternate perspectives on our past experiences, current concerns, and future potentials. It is hard to understand dreams because they are continually reaching beyond where we are to explore what we might become.

This is why it can be so helpful to share dreams with other people, to benefit from the insights of their different points of view. Jeremy Taylor and Montague Ullman each developed methods for sharing dreams in virtually any social setting, whether you know the other group members or not. Their methods were designed to maximize the information gleaned from the group while minimizing the imposition of their views on the dreamer and preserving the dreamer’s sense of safety and control of the process.

New AI technology can now provide a kind of virtual dream-sharing group, offering interpretations of a dream from multiple angles. I know this best from using the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app, which has AI tools offering several interpretive modes. If you enter a dream and try each of these modes (Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, etc.), you can experience an interesting virtual variant of a dream-sharing group, learning from the multiplicities of meanings generated by different modes.

AI Imagery

Already, AI can provide a decent simulation of a dream-sharing group in which the dreamer benefits from diverse comments and ideas. What AI can also now do, which would be very difficult to arrange with humans, is to provide in response to a dream with a variety of images in different styles. This offers an exciting new source of feedback for the dreamer, in a visual/imagistic rather than verbal/written form. For some dreams and some dreamers this may be an even more powerful interpretive method than a text-only approach.

To test the idea, I tried it with one of my own dreams, one with a strong central image that would hopefully make it easier to compare and evaluate different visual renderings. Here is the dream, titled “Space Tub”:

Some people are in space, in a space station, and their job is getting astronauts ready for their missions. But wait, I realize something is different, not right—they are preparing the astronauts to go down, not up; and when I see the vehicle in which the astronauts are to travel, I am very disappointed. It is a large white plastic tub, big enough for one person to sit in. Not very complex at all, just thin hard plastic. I am confused, this is such a simplistic device, I can’t imagine it will actually work.

The first image, above, came from Elsewhere’s Retro Camera style.

It’s a white tub, for sure. No astronauts, no space station, although it is very simple and unlikely to do what’s needed for the astronauts. Looking at the image, I realize I don’t know what the astronauts actually need. Would they like this?

Next was the Old Illustration style:

There’s a basic anachronism in asking AI to use the style of one era to illustrate events from another era. Here, it’s a kind of steam-punk mechanism on a non-Earth planet somewhere in space. The white tub appears as a classic Victorian-era footed bathtub. This image foregrounds the themes of time and technology and makes me think of the tub in relation to water and bathing.

My favorite was the Surrealist Collage:

This one has a beautiful space station, a host of astronauts, and a cheap plastic bowl. It’s the only one of the three that picks up on the down/up anomaly. The tub has water in it, which isn’t the case in the dream, but the previous image also associated the tub with water, so that’s something new I can think about. It’s a very amusing image, like a party of astronauts in an orbital hot tub. That whimsical quality makes me think of the astronauts as liminal beings, or as liminal modes of being human, living in the space between heaven and earth.

None of these images is a perfect replica of my dream, but that’s okay. It’s much more stimulating to look at how the different images highlight some features and obscure others, bringing out details I might not have noticed so quickly on my own. As with any form of dream-sharing, the results can vary. Sometimes the image is completely off the mark, to the point where I get annoyed at the AI for being so obtuse. But sometimes the image is so rich and multi-faceted that I feel an immediate “aha!” of grateful insight and recognition.

Downsides

Most of the AI image-generating tools available today are enmeshed in the ethical quandaries surrounding this technology, including its smash-and-grab approach to intellectual property and its massive hunger for energy. How we resolve those issues is still an open question. Also concerning is the bias of AI systems toward the expected and familiar, for instance determining what’s the next most likely word. The creative freedom of dreaming means you never know what the next word is going to be. At some point, the basic determinism of AI may clash with the basic indeterminism of dreaming. Finally, it could be problematic if the AI-generated images were so vivid that they replaced people’s own internal memories of their dreams, like when you see a photo of a childhood event that shapes and perhaps even takes over your memory of the event. Whatever tools you use for dream interpretation, your own experience of the dream should always remain at the center.

[Note: this post first appeared on Psychology Today’s website on April 30, 2025. The additional text below only appears here.]

I tried each of the available Elsewhere styles with this dream, and here’s what the other ones look like:

Comic Book:

This one is pretty good–it gives a sense of how the tub is an improbable vehicle for astronauts to travel. There’s no space station, although the up-down dynamics are strong. I find the faux text distracting.

Modern Illustration:

Ouch. It’s white, there’s something like a space station, and something like a tub. But no astronauts, no space, no movement, no weirdness, none of the atmospherics of the dream.

Storybook:

Aesthetically pleasing, and there’s a white tub… And a few stars, if you look closely. Otherwise it has nothing to do with my dream. I do like the celestial feline in the top right.

Woodblock:

This one has a lot going for it. I didn’t expect the Woodcut style to do much with a space scene, but this one is very close to the perspective I felt in the dream, and it’s good on the use of the tub for astronauts traveling down. The space station is disappointingly simple, however, and I don’t like the two-tone coloring.

I’ll close by saying this is a really fun way of playing with a dream and exploring different possible meanings. With the downsides mentioned above still in mind, I look forward to trying this again soon.

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Reflections on Among All These Dreamers (1996)

The first time I attended an annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams was in Santa Cruz in 1988. For the next several years (London in 1989, Chicago in 1990 (which I hosted), Charlottesville, Virginia in 1991) these conferences gave me an opportunity to learn more about the various ways in which people were exploring the origins, functions, and meanings of dreaming. One thing that struck me right away was that several people were looking at dreams not only as a source of personal insight but also as a source of insight into collective issues and concerns. Based on my own studies so far, this seemed like an important idea for dream researchers to develop further, even if it ran counter to the predominantly individualistic approach of most psychologists at that time.

Inspired by these colleagues at the IASD, I put together an edited book, Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society, which was published in 1996 by State University of New York (SUNY) Press as part of the Series in Dream Studies edited by Robert Van de Castle. Each of the chapters is a written version of material presented at an IASD conference and shaped by those conversations. Here are the chapter titles:

  1. Dreams and Social Responsibility: Teaching a Dream Course in the Inner-City –Jane White-Lewis
  2. The 55-Year Secret: Using Nightmares to Facilitate Psychotherapy in a Case of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Marion A. Cuddy & Kathryn E. Belicki
  3. Seeking the Balance: Do Dreams Have a Role in Natural Resource Management? – Herbert W. Schroeder
  4. Reflections on Dreamwork with Central Alberta Cree: An Essay on an Unlikely Social Action Vehicle – Jayne Gackenbach
  5. Black Dreamers in the United States – Anthony Shafton
  6. Sex, Gender, and Dreams: From Polarity to Plurality – Carol Schreier Rupprecht
  7. Traversing the Living Labyrinth: Dreams and Dream-Work in the Psychospiritual Dilemma of the Postmodern World – Jeremy Taylor
  8. Invitation at the Threshold: Pre-Death Spiritual Experiences – Patricia Bulkley
  9. Western Dreams about Eastern Dreams – Wendy Doniger
  10. Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election – Kelly Bulkeley
  11. Healing Crimes: Dreaming Up the Solution to the Criminal Justice Mess – Bette Ehlert
  12. Let’s Stand Up, Regain Our Balance, and Look Around at the World – Johanna King

The conclusion presents what I consider a “Soc. 2 Manifesto,” drawing upon ideas developed during the teaching I did at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1993 in the yearlong Social Sciences core sequence titled Self, Culture, and Society (Soc. 121-121-123), commonly known as Soc. 2. Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the modern world is a central notion here, which I believe casts a new and more urgent light on the cultural value of dreaming and its innately spiritual qualities.

The title came to me in a flash. One day while working on the book I thought, maybe I could use a phrase from Nietzsche. I stood up, took The Gay Science from my bookshelf, flipped it open, and almost immediately landed on Aphorism 54 and the following paragraph:

“Appearance for me is that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it make me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more—that among all these dreamers I, too, who ‘know,’ am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all and thus also the continuation of the dream.” (translation by Walter Kaufman, emphasis in original)

The book’s cover was not my design, although I’m okay with the trippy interplanetary image and vibrant magenta color. The SUNY Series in Dream Studies had a house style they wanted each new book to use, and that’s what we did here. The back cover endorsement from Montague Ullman was especially appreciated since he is one the true pioneers in the application of dream interpretation methods to group programs for community mental health.

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SDDb Upgrade

At long last, after many twists and turns, a new and improved version of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) has been released, just in time for spring! Many thanks to the Elsewhere.to team–Gez Quinn, Kat Juncker, Dan Kennedy, and Victoria Philibert–for their help in the upgrade process.  The SDDb is a growing archive of dream reports and survey data, with analytic tools designed to be used by anyone, from curious newcomers to advanced researchers. The SDDb offers two basic methods of studying dreams. One is to analyze the database’s collection of 18 demographic surveys to discover patterns of sleep and dreaming in relation to variables like age, ethnicity, sex assigned at birth, and religious beliefs. The second is to search the database’s collection of more than 45,000 dream reports gathered from many sources and available to study using built-in tools for identifying, analyzing, and comparing the frequencies of different categories of content.

Many features still need attention, along with better labeling for various questions and categories. Soon I will create written and video tutorials to help users navigate the SDDb’s collections and tools. With so much focus on the upgrade, I’ve been waiting to upload a few new series, and those should now get into the database in the very near future. If you have any suggestions to offer and/or problems to point out, I’d be grateful to hear them.