Cinema as Dream: Dreams and the Unconscious in Cinema

Cinema, with its unique power to convey, time, space, and perspective becomes a medium to express the subconscious. In this context, psychoanalysis, particularly the theories of Freud, offers a variety of frameworks for filmmakers to interpret films that feature dreams not merely as the part of the plot, but also as expressions of deeper psychic truths. As Sigmund Freud addresses dreams as ‘The royal road to the unconscious’, many filmmakers have taken this idea to convey narratives that go beyond the human psyche. From Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), with its Freudian motifs to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), dreams on screen have become a ground for psychoanalytic exploration.

In the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Sigmund Freud states that they reveal latent desires, fears, and conflicts through symbolic imagery. He described a process known as the dream-work, where the repressed thoughts, which are called latent content, are transformed into symbolic, often overt, surficial imagery, which he defined as manifest content, through mechanisms such as condensation, displacement, and symbolization.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and partly designed by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, Spellbound (1945) is a rich text for psychoanalytic analysis, especially because it explicitly engages with psychoanalysis as a plot device. Psychoanalyst Dr Constance Peterson, played by Ingrid Bergman, tries to cure a man who is suffering from amnesia and is accused of murder. She tries to uncover his repressed memories and trauma through psychoanalytic treatment, including the interpretation of dreams. The film includes a dream sequence that is designed by the famous artist Salvador Dali. In Spellbound, John Ballantyne, acted by Gregory Peck, suffers from amnesia, which is a classic symptom of repression. He has blocked out the traumatic memory of his brother’s accidental death in his childhood, which he believes he caused it. The emergence of fragmented memories and confusion about identity reflects the return of the repressed. So John’s repressed trauma is disguised in the manifest content of his dream through surreal images like eyes, masked figures, and scissors, which conceal the latent memory of his brother’s death. Spellbound exemplifies Freud's theories onscreen, particularly in how it presents the dream as a gateway to the unconscious and the resolution of repression through interpretation.

Written and Directed by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive is one of the most psychoanalytically rich films in modern cinema. It is a surreal, dreamlike narrative that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, consciousness and the unconscious. The first part of the film plays like a dream, fragmented, surreal, yet with internal logic. It's widely interpreted that this section represents Diane Selwyn’s dream, where her guilt over murdering Camilla is displaced into the noir mystery plot. In addition, the characters blend, with Camilla being Rita and Diane being Betty. Diane, failed both as an actress and a lover, creates Betty, who is everything Diane wants to be, in her own imagination. So, the dream is Diane’s narcissistic wish-fulfilment, masking her guilt and feelings of inferiority. In the Club Silencio scene, the dream acknowledges itself as a dream, a reflexive moment that destabilizes the fantasy. When a story acknowledges itself, it breaks its own frame.

‘No hay banda. It is all an illusion.’

With those words, the film demonstrates that Diane’s unconscious begins to collapse under the weight of the ‘Real’ as Lacan calls. In this way, Mulholland Drive invites the viewer to experience the psyche unfolding and to enter the unstable space where fantasy and trauma meet.