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Erdem Bostan Burcu Alkan ACL3098 10 March 2014 Freud and the Science of Sleep Michel Gondrys film titled The Science of Sleep tells the story of a shy, reclusive introvert who lives in his dreams, or in other words, can not separate reality from his dreams and the movie. Stphane is the protagonist and the movie starts in his head, which is designed like a surreal TV studio in which he is the cameraman, the director, the host and the musician at the same time. He is a man who moved to Paris for his mother, after his fathers death and throughout the movie, we watch his part dream, part real story with his next door neighbour Stphanie. As it is a movie in which we get into the protagonists head, and in his dreams, it is possible to read it using Sigmund Freuds theories about dreams, the mind and its workings. Stphane is a shy, introverted character in reality, but he is an agressive and confident character in his dreams and in his mind. As Sigmund Freud suggests that every dream is in one way or another a wish-fulfillment dream, we can argue that he wishes to be a character who is the exact opposite of his real self. Freud also says that the things that happened at the day before the dream are very important. He calls it the dream day. This concept is referred to in the first scene of the movie when Stphane lists the ingredients of a dream. In that list, the reminiscences of the day and the songs you heard that day are two important elements. We see an example of this in another wish-fulfillment dream where Stphane goes berserk at the office, attacks the boss and takes over the place before putting his own works on the walls and having sex with a coworker. Although he seems like a childish, asexual man, his id, his insticts takes over in his dream and expresses his desire to have sex, which is an instict This is a straight-forward

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wish-fulfillment dream and it has elements from the dream day, as he got disappointed about the job, got rejected by the boss when he showed him his works and got scared of a broken electric razor, which he uses in his dream to attack his boss. Freud suggests that human mind has conscious, unconscious and subconscious thought-processes, and as we are in Stphanes head, we can see these processes. When he speaks to us, the audience, the screens behind him show footage of his memories about his father, and this is a sign that he is in a grieving period and his subconscious mind is busy with the thoughts of his father. At first, it is not clear whether Stphane has a crush on Stphanie, or her roommate Zoe. In reality, it seems like he has a crush on Zoe but he constantly dreams about Stphanie. Although we will later see that he will fall in love with Stphanie, at first he even says that Stphanie reminds him of his father, and it makes you think that these dreams are wish-fulfillment dreams, that he associates Stphanie with his father and constantly dreams about Stphanie because he misses his father. This is what Sigmund Freud calls a displacement where the actual object is replaced with an object associated with it, which is a type of dream-distortion the mind does in order to resist and to avoid repressed emotions connected with unfortunate memories. Dream of convenience and anxiety dremas are two types of dreams described by Sigmund Freud. Dreams of convenience fulfill two functions. They satisfy a wish, and safeguard sleep. An example to this kind of dream in the movie is the scene where Stphane has a guilty conscience about lying to Stphanie about where he lived. To safeguard his sleep, and satisfy his wish by relieving his guilty conscience, he dreams that he writes a letter to Stphane and tells her about the lie he told. An anxiety dream is a dream where you feel anxiety in your dream until you wake up, and this is resistence of the mind to cloak unpleasant thoughts and emotions. Most of Stphanes dreams throughout the movie fall into this category.

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Sigmund Freud speaks of reality-testing in his works, which is a function of the ego that distinguishes between what is in his mind and what is occuring in the world outside. Stphane often fails at this, and ends up getting confused between reality and dreams. His mother mentions that he had this condition since he was a little boy. Cellophane and water becomes the reality test for the audience throughout the film. The Science of Sleep is a movie that goes back and forth between reality and dreams, and Freud is one of the most important people in history who tried to understand how dreams worked. I tried to read the movie in the light of Freudian concepts and theories. Im sure that more connections and better interpretations can be made, but dreams have endless possibilities for interpretation, and papers are not endless.