Oneiric music: Dream signals in early cinema.

Abstract

Oneiric sequences have figured into cinema almost from the medium's inception. In modern cinema, music often plays a key role in helping audiences distinguish between action that is supposedly "real" and action, whether enacted or recalled, that amounts to "just a dream." However, the convention of announcing a forthcoming dream scene by means of relatively strange music had a clear starting point in the 1940s, contemporaneous with the introduction of Freudian-Jungian dream theory into the mainstream of popular culture. How, one wonders, were dreams "signalled" in earlier cinema? This essay discusses filmic dream scenes in general, and in passing it notes-as readers of this journal surely know-that almost invariably the content of filmic dreams bears little relationship to what dreamers in fact experience. But the focus here is not on the content of filmic dreams but on their presentation, especially during the premodern era of the so-called silent film. Drawing on evidence from such diverse sources as published collections of "photoplay music" and animated cartoons from the 1930s, this essay suggests that the framing of cinematic dreams in films from the early decades of the 20th century was not at all like what audiences of today perhaps take for granted.