ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the similarities between the mechanisms of dreaming and artistic techniques. Because such similarities exist, the analysis of dreams and other pictorial productions of the mind can contribute to iconographic analysis. The iconographer deals with specific artistic motifs by researching them. Sigmund Freud identified three classes of dreams in 1901: wish fulfillments, anxiety dreams, and dreams in which the content is disturbing but the feeling is not. Dreams are primarily pictorial; they have been changed from ideas, thoughts, feelings, and impressions, which can be expressed verbally. Dreams obey the laws of visual rather than verbal representation, because the dreamer regresses from words to pictures. Delusions and hallucinations, although sometimes auditory, are more usually visual. Displacement in the visual arts can reflect the unconscious symbolic relationships between parts of the body. Brancusi repeated the motif of Bird in Space in nineteen marble and bronze sculptures.
