Is Dream Still Unconscious? Imaginary Immersivity and Dream Machines in Contemporary Visual Episteme

The article assumes the existence of a mutual cultural influence between the technologies circulating in a given context, the forms and strategies by which dreaming is visually and narratively encoded in the media, and contemporary scientific theories of dreaming. From this perspective, I investigate an epistemological fracture that emerges in contemporary cognitive theories of dreaming: one that sees the dream no longer as unconscious, but as a conscious model of the world acting offline rather than online. In these theories, the conscious character of the dream experience is exemplified precisely by the idea of a “virtual reality” acting inside the brain, capable of optimizing our relationship with the world through a precise training that takes place in a safe space. From this acknowledgment, the influences of these theories are considered in the complex narrative structures (often related to the puzzle movie form) that characterize contemporary films centered on the hybridization between dream and virtual reality. These are often exemplified by the idea of a “dream machine” that allows multiple users to access a single dream space, as happens in Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006), a film centered on an imaginary device that allows psychotherapists to enter the dreams of their patients.