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Nightmares in literature and art
contents
- From antiquity to the modern age
- Anarchic pleasure in the freedom of the dream
- Nightmares - A playground for creative people
- The Black Romance
- Piranesi and "The Nightmare"
- The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters
- Dreams of dread
- The dreaming is the hero of the romance
- Break the line between dream and reality
- In the wake of the Enlightenment
- Psychoanalysis and regressive longing
- trances
- Art and psychoanalysis
- The expressionists
- The surrealism
- The nightmare worlds of H.P. Lovecraft
- Literature and dream
- The narrator gets into a nightmare
- Nightmares show the truth
- Horror without awakening
- Dream, delusion and reality
- Dream without resolution
- Fantastic realism
- Regression of the reader
- New myths, old unconscious
From antiquity to the modern age
In the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the border between literature and faith blurs, because dreams also contain messages of the gods. In modern times, the dream motif is a joker of the author, as the readers often know, in contrast to the characters, that it is a dream and what causes it. In the fantastic literature, there is also tension because the reader, like figures, often does not know whether it is a dream or not.
Dreams have played a significant role in European literature since antiquity. (Image: LeitnerR / fotolia.com) The author leads the reader deeper and deeper into a dream world and only clarifies at the end, if this really happens and is connected with extrasensory events, or rationally explains, when the characters wake up from the dream. Or else, the end remains open - here nightmares provide a cliff, because people in real dreams take the moods into the day's events.
Anarchic pleasure in the freedom of the dream
Felix Krämer writes in his essay "Black Romance - An Approach": "When in Dali's painting The Dream, caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, a second before awakening a tiger falls on a naked woman, if the abdomen of this Predator grows out of the gaping mouth of a fish and this in turn peels out of a pomegranate, when the sharp bayonet of a flying rifle threatens to drill into the body of the naked, while an elephant walks on its endless spider legs over, then the anarchic Lust for the world of dreams.
The painter Max Ernst, a studied philosopher and psychologist, even demanded "to dissolve the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world."
Nightmares - A playground for creative people
Nightmares provide a rich breeding ground for artists: they are not restricted by any framework, as a literary motif they per se go beyond the framework set by everyday reality; they are allowed to contradict logic and even laws of nature, thus enabling the highest degree of creative development.
Consequently, Goethe, like Schiller, Lessing or Diderot, bathed themselves in dreams - with one important limitation. The dreaming remains integrated into his external reality in the Age of Enlightenment. Reason embeds the dream event.
The Black Romance
"Two soul layers are known, in which man expresses himself more unrestrainedly and unconditionally: the districts of the dream and the unconscious. When these were accepted as decisive forces, (...) the turn to romanticism was complete, "wrote Einstein.
By 1800, artists of the Romantic period no longer saw the inexplicable and the mysterious as a problem, but as a source of inspiration. Instead of the visual and measurable, they were enthusiastic about the Numinose: the bizarre, the madness and the nightmare were more attractive to them than the flawless.
The black romance loved the irrational, the scary spooky and the demonic Grosteske. The dilapidated painters and writers explored the worlds of nightmares, psychic disturbances, fears and dark sides of the human, as far as possible. They no longer wanted to show the line between nightmare and reality, but just set this limit in their works.
Her ideal was to get close to the dream with narrative forms; their figures came into twilight, dusk and otherworld, where the shadows come to life and the appearance becomes reality. The black romanticism begins where reason ends and the figures of the repressed emerge. The nightmare became the model of a poetic model.
Romantic artists considered inexplicable and mysterious phenomena as a source of inspiration. (Image: Lario Tus / fotolia.com) Piranesi and "The Nightmare"
The artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi is one of the models of the Black Romanticism. His engravings from the second half of the 19th century such as "The Drawbridge" show underground dungeons and oppressive settings.
Leading Black Romantic writers such as Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire or E.T. A. Hoffmann interpreted Piranesi's visions as artist-turned-nightmares.
Another milestone of the nightmares depicted in the picture was "The Nightmare" of Johann Heinrich Füssli from 1781. Nightmare means in the English nightmare and at the same time denotes a demonic horse. Nightmare comes from the Alb (elf), who, in popular belief, sat in a terrible dream, the dreamer on the chest.
Füssli implemented these ideas directly. A woman in a white nightgown lies asleep on her bed while an ugly naked Alb squats on her chest, a creature with oversized ears, the face of an old man with apelike features and a mischievous expression on her face. From the darkness in the background looks a ghostly gray horse with white eyeballs without pupils.
Johannes Grave writes in his essay "Die Nachtseiten der bildenden Kunst" around 1800: "Obviously, the picture shows neither the nightmare-troubled woman alone, nor the ghastly dream itself. The reality of the sleeping and their dream events merge, however, in a kind and manner Way that makes the viewer shudder. "
How this happens, Grave describes: "Although he may initially think that he is at a safe distance from the depicted event, his gaze threatens to assume voyeuristic traits to the same extent as the pairs of eyes of the Alb and the horse's head suggest." The viewer also loses control : "The fact that such a gaze no longer bears witness to rational control and sovereignty is illustrated by the horse's ghostly empty yet strangely bright eyeballs. The look itself seems to become a source of violence and terror. "
There is, according to Grave, no objective view: "In this way Füssli's Nachtmahr not only shows the peculiar crossing of borders between reality and fiction, as it is peculiar to every dream image. Rather, the painting makes it clear that we can not gain a secure, external point of view in order to look on the momentum of the phenomenal phenomena as supposedly uninvolved people. "Füssli thus anticipated the findings of modern dream research.
Füssli's themes were the eternal conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, dream and waking state.
Sigmund Freud hung a copy of the Nachtmahr in the entrance to his psychotherapeutic practice.
The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters
In 1797, Francisco de Goya drew the first sketches of his work "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters", which can be seen today in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Grave writes: "It is the birth of phantoms and monsters from the interplay of free imagination and unleashed hand that the viewer sees at the mercy of. (...) The drawing, it appears soon, not only reflects the self-activity of the imagination in sleep and dream, but is their venue and execution form. "
Thus, Goya's style also went crazy about the limits of the real: "It provides the basis for making sure that the uncanny, cruel or embarrassing scenes are neither clearly affected by reality nor by a distant fantasy world alone. Goya relinquishes the classical linear perspective and thus an unequivocal clarification of the spatial conditions and instead emphasizes the reason (...) which soon appears as a surface, now as a depth, he settles his representations in a place without a place, yet full of references to the Reality is. "
His art "no longer serves only to make the hardly controllable image worlds of the imagination vivid, but has itself a decisive share in the production of these uncanny images," says Grave.
Hubertus Kolbe interprets the work in his contribution "Nightmare Fear Apocalypse. The uncanny and catastrophic in the art of modernity ":" The monsters always come out when reason withdraws - to let the unclear imagination, the wild leaps of the imagination, the uncontrollable of creativity have the lead. "He also gives an explanation why nightmares not only scare, but also attract: "The terrible is attractive and repulsive at the same time, it fascinates and generates disgust, whoever falls for him, will only be at the price of (...) boredom again from him."
Nightmares make for horror and fascination alike. (Image: esthermm / fotolia.com) Dreams of dread
Works of romance from Baudelaire to Novalis, from Tieck to Kleist, from Hoffmann to Poe are impossible without dreams. Some stories from E.T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe are nothing more than literature-driven dreams of dread, Baudelaire celebrates the bizarre dissolution of boundaries we experience in nightmares.
The dreaming is the hero of the romance
The reality for the romantics was their dreamed fairytale world, the unconscious, their hero the longing dreamer, the enjoyment of the supreme purpose of the
Life. Imagination and mind should fill the sober world with life, ambiguity and ambiguity, blurring of forms and genres put the opposition to the primacy of the mind. Complete subjectivity, individualization, freedom, cosmopolitanism were the attitudes that the Romantics opposed to the bourgeois virtues of modernity, diligence, accuracy, punctuality, and austerity.
Break the line between dream and reality
"The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes a world", wrote the romantic Novalis. The romantic poets built up illusions that destroyed them; they wanted to poetize life; they broadened the scope for empathy, celebrating all transitions, transvestivism, and setting free fantasy over form. They wanted to break the line between science and poetry, dream and reality.
Imagination and reality are not clearly separated in the stories and pictures of the romantics, they work through the play with illusion and disillusion and put to the test the sensory impressions of the reader and the viewer.
Mareike Hennig writes in "What You Seen in the Dark ... Black Romanticism in German Painting until 1850": "Dark and night not only harbor danger and terror in romanticism, but also mystery and dream, areas that are in abysses, but can also lead to knowledge, ambivalent and appealing at the same time. "
Roland Borgards describes in "The light was removed - to the literature of the black romanticism" the special meaning of the night and the dream for the romance: "the Enlightenment predilection for the day, the brightness, the clarity and with it connected the seeing, the thinking, order and rationality are opposed to that of romanticism, an epoch which is obviously sensitive to light and shy of light. "
In the wake of the Enlightenment
At the same time, however, the passion of the romantics for the unconscious, the madness and the nightmare presupposes the enlightenment. Psychology in literature unfolds for the first time in Romanticism and its need to express the shadow contents of the psyche as directly as possible.
Novalis did not think much of rational thinking. It was for him "just a dream of feeling, a dead feeling, a pale gray, weak life". In the dream, the Romantics suspected the core of poetry - but they saw it as an essential source of knowledge.
Psychoanalysis and regressive longing
A foreshadowing of the importance of the unconscious discussed in psychoanalysis decades later combined with a yearning to come close to the archaic origins of being human. Thus Schlegel sketched dreams as the "thread of another dark consciousness, (...) which apparently wanders about in disorderly play, but actually follows only another and its own law of visual similarity or the elective affinity of the inner feeling; and this faculty of imagination, which is governed by conscious and unconscious feeling in dark and brighter pictures, is, moreover, that it shares the control over the prudent and awake state of man with reason, including the dark dream-world of dormant consciousness. "
trances
The romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich wrote: "Close your physical eye, so that with the spiritual eye you first see your image. Then bring to light what you see in the dark, that it reverts to others from the outside in. "The truly menacing thing does not come from the outside world that man depicts, but from his own brain - and so does the nightmare.
In Germany, romantics associated the notion of systemic change with withdrawal from society; the transfiguration of everyday life should change him. Rousseau's idea of the state of nature provided the model for the glorification of an original, unreflected understanding of the world that modern mankind had lost and was still present only in children and in the people.
A longing, the goal of which had to remain indefinable, found its places: ruins, castles, cemeteries, forests, caves and generally primordial natural landscapes, but also the "Orient", the "Orient" or other distant lands.
Romantics like Clemens von Brentano consciously moved into states between dream and alertness and tried to capture the picture worlds that appear there. This resulted in extremely associative moods, always associated with an overarching crisis and a setting atmosphere that knew no literary boundaries: nightmare, death and emotion merged into each other.
Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff, but also Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe created new ways to bring the nightmare into the literature. Leading the way were, among others, "The Elixirs of the Devil" (1815-16) by E.T. A. Hoffmann.
Art and psychoanalysis
In the early days of psychoanalysis, in 1881, Max Klinger created the graphic "Fears": A man lies asleep on a pillow. Horror figures lead the dreaming to a glove, which became a fetish of love in the graphic series, but now turns into a danger.
Coal writes that (Klinger) not only contentwise but also structurally brings the associative nature of the dream into an aesthetically adequate form. "
Odilon Redon finally showed in "I saw a big pale light" no longer the dreaming, but the nightmare itself, a big, pale light that emerges from darkness. Redon painted "like a dream," said Kohle: "The elements of a coherent narrative are put together in such a way that coherence is lost. The observer who is deeply confused results even more from this disparity than from the gloomy (...) narrative itself. "
The Expressionists focused on the nightmare with themes like the annihilation of the world. (Image: York / fotolia.com) The expressionists
The romantics intoxicated themselves in all dream worlds. The Expressionists after and during the First World War, however, focused on the nightmare. Works such as "Cocaine" by Gottfried Benn or "Decay" by Johannes R. Becher are dreams of destruction, the destruction of man and the annihilation of the world.
The surrealism
"I believe in the future resolution of these seemingly contradictory states of dream and reality in a kind of absolute reality, if one can say: surreality", postulated in 1924 the founder of surrealism, André Breton.
Surrealism also influenced Freud's dream interpretations as well as the nightmares of Expressionism. The unconscious was for them the origin of art, their own psyche the central theme of their art. Truth they sought in intoxication, madness and dreams. Contradictions such as life and death, dream and reality should create a dreamlike surreality to liberate people.
Ingo Borges writes in "The Omnipotence of the Dream. Romance and surrealism ":" (...) no "Gothic novel" does without night pictures. For the Surrealists too, the night was the time in which man is thrown back on himself and confronted in the dream with the repressed and unconscious. "
The nightmare worlds of H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the most famous authors of uncanny-fantastic stories. Above all, his stories are universes of fear. Inhuman beings dominate his worlds, for these people's civilizations are just a plaything of cosmic power games.
Literature and dream
Lovecraft's quality does not consist in subtle actions, complex characters or amazing punchlines, but in drawing the reader directly into the images of nightmare worlds. His literary skills were always controversial, many critics considered him to be a dilettante, whose frequent adjectives and recurring patterns of old books, sinister cults, and ominous creatures would be reminiscent of dime novels. This is an open question.
Important for the author, however, is the combination of literature and dream. In Lovecraft's repetitive cosmic threats, hell-throes, dilapidated cities, rotten jungles, and "indescribable" monsters from another world, images of the unconscious are reflected in their dreams. Lovecraft does not analyze the disintegration of the individual psyche like Edgar Allan Poe, but he represents the abyss, instead of enlightening them and leaves the pictures so stand.
The writer H. P. Lovecraft manages to draw the reader directly into the images of nightmare worlds. (Image: Leo Lintang / fotolia.com) The narrator gets into a nightmare
Like in a bad dream Lovecrafst storytellers experience events that do not fit into their order of space and time. In contrast to the classic short story, the storytellers' actions are completely unimportant for this horror - except that they open the Pandora's box. Abominable rites, dark cults, forests full of monstrosities characterize even the terror in atmospheric density. The individual person is unimportant, the world itself becomes horror, that is comparable to the patterns of dream images.
Nightmares show the truth
Even in the stories themselves, the narrators' dreams play a decisive role, be it that a person in "Shadows of Time" dreams of his or her existence in the body of an ancient species and thus of an experienced reality, be it in the "dream quest" the unknown Kadath "that the narrator through his dreams to the world creator.
The narrators, whether artists or scientists realize that the myths of the old books and traditions that they themselves considered to be fool's tales are true. They design an everyday explanation after the other for the horror, yet doubt more and more of their rational explanations step by step. Dream pictures, as in C.G. Young patterns of the unconscious can be empirically confirmed and come into the real world. The world becomes abnormal.
Horror without awakening
Instead of awakening from the dream, the narrators in the end realize that "everything is right". Individual images keep returning like the howling of the wind in "Mountains of Madness". The narrator himself is frightened by his experiences, as in a dream before awakening, the images are condensing more and more at the end of the stories. They are more and more similar to fever fantasies, psychoses or mania, ie the states in which inner and outer reality are no longer distinguishable for those affected.
Dream, delusion and reality
The narrator himself considers the experiences to be dreams until, in psychiatry or the preparation for suicide, he realizes that they are not. Images of the unconscious, as they spread in the dream become in the author's stories to an event in the material world. In just this border crossing is the horror of Lovecraft's stories.
Dream without resolution
His mythical beings, ancient gods, Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu or Shub-Niggurath, remain mysterious, like a dream that is not thoroughly analyzed, dissected, unclassified. This obscurity, this obscurity, in Freud's terms the id, overwhelms the narrators, and at best the reader. There is no resolution that could bring structure and order. The unknown itself triggers the fear in a dream. An avowed Cthulhu is no longer terrible, as is a processed dream. Caves lie beneath caves, abysses under precipices, architecture is of unknown geometry, contrary to the laws of nature, as people experience it every night in their dreams.
Fictional beings, such as the Cthulhu, remain with H.P. Lovecraft mysterious. (Image: Christos Georghiou / fotolia.com) Fantastic realism
Lovecraft's fantastic realism is like the border between dream and waking state in the clash of two worlds, one normal and one fantastic. The trick with him is that the fantastic world is the real one.
This other world hides behind the normal world, and it is horrible. Dreams, sleepwalking, confused speech in sleep, changes in space and time, for example, in "Dreams in the witch's house" build the horror. These two worlds are also expressed in the fact that modern scientists are confronted with the archaic horrors, with witches and monsters.
Regression of the reader
That is, the writer forces his readers from the technical thinking of modern times back to the oldest patterns of the psyche, childhood and dream symbols. The myth, the plastic representation of the unconscious, penetrates the science of Lovecraft. It could also be about dreams of scientists of his time, evolutionarily altered animal species, hypotheses about fourth dimensions, the possibility of living on other planets.
New myths, old unconscious
The author makes a line between new myths and the old unconscious. Ultimately, the "old gods" are not only hostile to humans, they are also completely amoral, like horror pictures in dreams. Lovecraft's contribution to fabulous literature is to revive the ancient patterns of the unconscious in the technological age. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Literature:
Felix Krämer (ed.): Black Romance. From Goya to Max Ernst (exhibition catalog). Frankfurt am Main 2012.