Understanding Media, Understanding Dream Vision
Brave New World of Mass Media -or- Ways of Seeing the Global Village
This dream interpretation discusses the pervasive psychophysical effects of mass media influence on our dreams. Media has the persuasive power to shape our cognition, perception, behaviour and our dreams. Using a social psychological point of departure to research media effects on dreams, mind, body, and society, we can begin to understand Charlotte Beradt's ground breaking book "Third Reich of Dreams".
Beradt investigated the media effects of the Nazi's propaganda machinery and mind control techniques found operating in ordinary German's dreams. Read the interpretation, "The Psychodynamic Problem of Democracy".
Today, we can find the pervasive "business enterprise" influences of mass media, the culture industries, the Hollywood dream factory and consumer society in our dreams. The two dream interpretations below illustrate the problems of the influence of media;
Freud had recognized the human body is a "plastic art form", this is not a new idea, it is inculcated in Leonardo Da Vinci's poetic vision of "Vitruvian Man". If the artistic and mythological human medium is the message, then Marshall McLuhan "Understanding Media" not surprisingly follows Freud's lead, and chooses the myth of Narcissus to understand the effects of media. In this sense, our oral tradition and visually mediated culture are seen as narcissistic extensions and visual cultural paradigmatic projections of ourselves.
Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" had recognized art becomes employed in the service of the culture industries shaping our "Ways of Seeing". Many of the dream interpretations posted at the IIDR website speak of postmodern visual culture, "Veblen Effects", "status seeking", and "conspicuous consumption" in the "phantasmagoria" of the narcissism of "Postmodern Times" (read synoptic dream interpretation about visual culture in the global village).
This ongoing state of affairs can only breed the agonistic dreams of narcissism, which then become the historical stuff that the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams in the Global Village" is paved with.
Social Construction of Reality -or- The Cultural Matrix of Dream Vision
McLuhan "Understanding Media" states; "...so the latest approach to media study considers not only the ‘content' but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates." This cultural communication matrix of media shapes our senses, our perception, cognition, decisions, behaviour and our dreams.
Right now, all the media listed from A to Z below are operating somewhere in the global village and in our dreams. If Vitruvian narcissism philosophically forms the behavioual-economic and artistic base, then media builds the superstructure of communication and the "social construction of reality" in the global village. Here then are dream interpretations that discuss most of the media found on the list of McLuhan's "Understanding Media" (with a few additions);
- Advertisements,
- Airplanes,
- Art,
- Books;
- Cars,
- Clocks,
- Clothes,
- Computers,
- Electricity
- Games;
- Housing
- Money,
- Motorcycles
- Movies;
- Music
- Number
- Photography
- Print and Electronic Media,
- Ships
- Telephone
- Television
- Animated Dreams
- American Conspiracy Theory or- Welcome to the Machine
- American Idol
- Boulevard of Broken Dreams in 3D
- Dreaming in Australia
- Mind Control -or- Welcome to the Machine
- Television Networks and the Culture Industries
- The Dreams TV Guide are Made Of
- The Influencing Machine and Visual Culture
- Opera and Theatre;
- Trains
- Weapons;