Reading Dreams
University of North Florida English Department Commons
Installed Fall 2023
All images for this project are from a submerged copy of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
South Wall
North Wall
Installation Photos, September. 22, 2023
Donal McConnon, "Curly Organ," performing in the Commons, October 20, 2023
“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”
—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
A paperback copy of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had, for several weeks, been left submerged in a large jar of tinted water, a part of an installation presented at the University of North Florida library in 2011. Later, a series of photographs was taken of the immersed book, the lines of language seen over time in various states of decay. Sentences from opposite pages were often visible bleeding through the paper and into the picture, obscuring the sentences, or even reversing the words, a bit like a strange dream faintly discerned, watery fragments of forgotten phrases.
For the project titled Reading Dreams, photographs of Freud’s decomposing book were used for this large-scale, permanent installation in the UNF English Department’s Commons Area. On opposite sides of the room, two walls are nearly filled (8’ x 20’) with photographs from the deteriorating book. At such scale, the blurring words arise from out of the water—on one side of the room in a haze of gray, on the other in a veil of blue. Upon the walls, Freud’s printed pages now surround those in the room as they read from their books and computer screens, immersed in their own quiet engagement with the words floating before them, a daydream of unraveled thought and imagination.
The photographed folds of many of the book’s pages create deepening shadows into which Freud’s very language often appears to slide into its own darkening and illegible obscurity, as if into the “dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown,” and into the tangled dream of a dream’s interpretation.
—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
A paperback copy of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had, for several weeks, been left submerged in a large jar of tinted water, a part of an installation presented at the University of North Florida library in 2011. Later, a series of photographs was taken of the immersed book, the lines of language seen over time in various states of decay. Sentences from opposite pages were often visible bleeding through the paper and into the picture, obscuring the sentences, or even reversing the words, a bit like a strange dream faintly discerned, watery fragments of forgotten phrases.
For the project titled Reading Dreams, photographs of Freud’s decomposing book were used for this large-scale, permanent installation in the UNF English Department’s Commons Area. On opposite sides of the room, two walls are nearly filled (8’ x 20’) with photographs from the deteriorating book. At such scale, the blurring words arise from out of the water—on one side of the room in a haze of gray, on the other in a veil of blue. Upon the walls, Freud’s printed pages now surround those in the room as they read from their books and computer screens, immersed in their own quiet engagement with the words floating before them, a daydream of unraveled thought and imagination.
The photographed folds of many of the book’s pages create deepening shadows into which Freud’s very language often appears to slide into its own darkening and illegible obscurity, as if into the “dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown,” and into the tangled dream of a dream’s interpretation.
Copyright © 2023 Clark Lunberry. All rights reserved.