As I wake, the worlds collide, melting into one another. Reality gives way to alternatives, one narrative ends; beginning another. Sleeping; dreams left behind, giving way to waking dreams. Real giving in to the surreal, the story in another form. While waking I am not sure where I am, living within and between worlds. As yet unfocused and unsure; I am awake nonetheless. Is it all just one? Is it the same story? When awake; how will I know when I’m awake? Is this real or that? Can I turn the page, burn it to a new age? The world seems both logical and irrational at the same time. This simultaneous mixture of real and unreal, rational and irrational, creates quite a sensation and conjures an eerie ambiguity. Dreams seem to be a loosening of the psychological reins, which tend to remain taut throughout the day. The brain chemistry of the sleeping mind is different to that of the waking mind, which may in part account for some of the odd and mysterious symbols that show up. How fragile is this difference within dream life and waking life? Many have posed the question are we all living in a dream world where the unconscious secretly dictates our every thought? Are we asleep or are we awake? Does it have to be one or the other? Are these truly separate states? Ambiguity makes it possible for humans to ponder many interpretations of a single thing, an event or experience, constantly fascinated with alternating states of thought.

This book explores the cognitive inter-dynamics of two overarching dimensions of human consciousness, referred to as This World and The Otherworld, respectively. Together, these dimensions may create, for any developing girl, a more-or-less unique experience of the archetype referred to here as Lolita, in the Mist. This “mist” may be a vital detail of Lolita imagery for an individual girl feeling protected enough to explore her budding sexuality in This World that is conjured, to a significant degree, through The Otherworld dimension. Indeed, such imagery may be a part of what dreaming experienced in waking life is made of. The book will be of interest to scholars and other researchers interested in how visual and social perceptual processes, principally through film imagery, might create a more phenomenological experience of the archetype through the interplay between This World and The Otherworld, as each exists within all of us.

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

Dreamscape by Jayne Ann Krentz\Anne Stuart\Bobby Hutchinson released on Aug 25, 1993 is available now for purchase.

Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.

Acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of this or any other time, Bergman has with few exceptions written his own screenplays--an uncommon practice in the film industry--and for this practice critics refer to him as a "literary" filmmaker: In this work, Gado examines virtually the entire range of Bergman's literary output. While treating the matter of the visual presentation of Bergman's films, Gado concentrates on story and narrative and their relationship to Bergman's personal history. Gado concludes that whatever the outward appearance of Bergman's works, they contain an elementary psychic fantasy that links them all, revealing an artist who hoped to be a dramatist, "the new Strindberg," and who saw the camera as an extension of his pen.