There is definitely something about dreams that makes them good material for art. For one, it seems like our imagination is not limited by what we know about the world, it is not limited by our view of what art should look like (for instance, there is no such thing as “genre” in dreams), but most of all it is not limited by reason of logic. That is why our dreams are full of such rich and powerful imagery that we could never come up with in real life.

Another thing that makes dreams so attractive is a certain level of familiarity in them; people often dream similar dreams - the ones where the dreamer is starting to fall just before he is going to wake up, for instance, is one we have all heard of people dreaming.

Take Luis Bunuel’s film “The Discrete Charm of French Bourgeoisie”, an ensemble of dream-like scenes, some of them based on dreams that followed him through his whole life. Such scenes in “the Charm” include the one where a man meets his friend in a dark alley, but then realizes that his friend has been dead for ages and for some reason he can’t tell him that. In another scene a character suddenly realizes that he is standing on a stage with the audience staring at him and he slowly realizes that he doesn’t know the text. Such scenes owe their familiarity to the fact that we dreamed such dreams sometime in our own life. Among comic artists who explore dreams in such way, the best known to me is Alexander Zograf.

There is another approach to dreams - Freudian - that sees dreams as the most precise mirror of what is happening in our head and how events from real life filter through it. Thus the recording of dreams is the recording of Man’s subconscious and most intimate thoughts.

Surrealist painters and poets (Max Ernst, Juan Miro, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritt, Andre Breton and aforementioned Luis Bunuel as well) had such a view on dreams and it is their recording of dreams that lend their works such imagery that was probably more influential and remembered than the theory behind it is.

Regardless of what we think of those theories, it is undeniable that dreams allow our imagination to wander free and that using, borrowing or the simple recording of dreams gives it originality that we perhaps would not be able to reach in a conscious state. Dreams are also able to give us an aura of familiarity that I mentioned before, and a fine veil of irrational mystery.

I’ve found two basic ways of using dreams. The first is simple - the plain re-telling of dreams, or at least the part that you remember. This approach is very close to a surrealist process. Sometimes unsatisfied with the traditional chiaroscuro process of painting (with achieving impression of three dimensions), claiming it to take too long to record the dream before it fades out, surrealists sometimes found the solution in faster processes of collage (Ernst) or line-drawing on canvass (Miro, Andre Masson).

The other approach to using dreams is basically taking scenes from dreams as a motor for forming the story, with a lot of gaps within them that the author is going to fill with the standard elements of the story until the complete story is formed. In most of his post-surrealist career, Bunuel preferred this method. Sometimes I run into a comic that is wonderfully irrational and puzzling that I am sure that it is based on a dream even though I can’t get a confirmation on that by the author.

So if you wish to use dreams as your tool you may want some advice on how to remember them better. Some people say that they never dream. In fact everybody dreams but some people remember dreams better than others. Dreams are mostly forgotten just after waking up. Therefore it is very important to write the dream down right after you wake. It is good to have pen and paper next to your bed so that you can grab them as you become conscious. You can’t allow yourself to be lazy because with every minute of conscious state, even while still lying in the bed, memory of your dream fades away.

If you can’t remember a dream after you wake, you might try staying in bed for a little while. People who research dreams say what turning around in bed helps too; supposedly dreams are projected in positions your body was in while you were dreaming a particular dream. If your body finds itself in a position in which it was in while dreaming the dream, the dream might come back to you.

If you are woken in the middle of the dream you get to remember it. Some people wind their clock to ring several times during an early morning for a better chance to be awoken in the middle of some dream. This doesn’t seem very good for your beauty sleep though.

In later phases of research on dreams people manage to be conscious during the dream, to realize that they are dreaming, and to manage to control their actions in the dream. These are topics that exceeded both this article’s intention and my knowledge. Plus, I’ve heard that it depends on a person whether it’s going to work or not.

For an interesting examination of dreams through intensive drawing of their imagery, check Head Doctor Productions, probably the most Freudian of webcomics.

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