Section outline
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8.2: Dreams
The influence of dreams in art is significant. Dreams provide creative subject matter for visual artists and play an additional role in art through ceremony and ritual. For example, William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream continues to be a popular play from Elizabethan literature.
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Students mustView
Dreams have always had a strong appeal in culture – we can interpret them as divine messages of a deeply spiritual kind or as material psychoanalysts scrutinize for clues about mental disorders. For example, surrealist artists draw on both kinds of ideas. They believe dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious" – they simultaneously invoke art's ancient origins and use more contemporary scientific approaches to explore dreamlike material in their visual works. Read this text for more explanation.
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