Art of the Unconscious Mind

Source: Art of the Unconscious Mind, hochelaga, 14:02, uploaded 2023-01-12, playlist index 124.

On 7 June 1525, Albrecht Dürer woke from a nightmare about a flood that ended the world. He wrote down what he had seen and made a watercolour sketch. The image became a record of a private vision before the vision disappeared. hochelaga uses this scene to open a history of artists who turn dreams, fears, half-seen forms, and imagined worlds into pictures.

Dreams before Surrealism

The video begins with the ordinary strangeness of dreaming. Sleep closes the eyes whilst the mind continues to see. hochelaga gives roughly two hours per night as the duration of this phase and points out that people often forget most of it after waking. Other intelligent mammals appear to dream, yet humans have the means to record and depict their visions through art.

For Aboriginal Australians, the video presents dreaming as part of belief, custom, and the transmission of stories. Artists use rust-coloured pigments and dotted marks to depict encounters with spirits, ancestors, and animals. These images carry legends about the formation of the world. hochelaga describes Aboriginal Australians as the oldest continuous culture on Earth and suggests that their art may preserve the oldest unbroken artistic tradition, a claim that needs more careful cultural and historical framing than the short video can provide.

References to dreams also appear in early writing. The video describes ancient dreams as journeys taken by the soul, linking the spirit world with physical life. It gives the ancient Egyptian word resut, meaning awakening, as evidence of a tradition that treated dreams as a clearer form of perception. Biblical visions carry the same weight. In the story of Jacob’s ladder, angels move between heaven and earth whilst Jacob sleeps. Jusepe de Ribera’s painting places a sleeping man in the foreground and lets pale, easily missed figures suggest the angels above him. The scene depends on delayed recognition. A viewer can look at a plain sleeping figure and then discover the vision around him.

Nightmares produce a darker branch of this tradition. Early Christian art contains hellscapes by Hieronymus Bosch and strange demon drawings from the sixteenth century. German and Slavic folklore explained bad dreams through the mare, a creature that sat on a sleeping person’s chest. hochelaga connects the story to sleep paralysis, when the mind wakes before the body and frightening visual hallucinations can appear. The folklore gives a supernatural body to an experience that the video explains through sleep.

Dreams can also carry good fortune. Japanese mythology associates the first dream of the year with an eagle, Mount Fuji, and an eggplant. Japanese woodblock images often show the three together. Odilon Redon encountered Japanese art at the end of the nineteenth century and used dream symbols in his own work. The Cyclops places the giant Polyphemus behind a hill, whilst other works dissolve into colour, tone, and pale forms. His nickname, “The Prince of Dreams”, describes the way these pictures hover between a recognisable subject and a private impression. Redon disliked attempts to fix their meaning. He wanted viewers to experience what the images stirred in them.

Freud, Redon, and the surrealist wager

Redon’s dream pictures helped prepare the movement that hochelaga then calls Surrealism. In 1900, Sigmund Freud described dream interpretation as a route into the unconscious. He treated dream images as symbols that could disclose hidden desires, fears, and hopes. A box of jewels might suggest greed, a skull might point towards a fear of death, and a mask might express embarrassment. Freud used these readings in his work with patients.

The video carries the same question into art. Edvard Munch’s The Scream gives anxiety a face and a distorted landscape. A small pencil inscription in the upper-left corner reads, “could only have been painted by a madman”. The inscription’s authorship remains uncertain, so the painting’s relation to madness stays open even as viewers read the central figure as an expression of anguish.

In the 1920s, French artists drew on Freud’s theories and tried to let images emerge from beneath deliberate control. Their strange subjects and impossible landscapes were “beyond reality”, which supplied the name Surrealism. Salvador Dalí becomes the video’s main example. The Persistence of Memory places melting clocks in a bare landscape, with ants around one clock, a closed eye-like shape in the centre, and a solitary egg in the distance. The paintings invite psychological readings, yet the video leaves their exact meaning unresolved. Dalí was a vivid dreamer, and several of his paintings record scenes he saw whilst asleep.

The title Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking describes one such scene with unusual precision. Tigers carrying guns leap from a giant fish. An elephant with long, thin legs stands in the background. The image’s parts refuse a stable order, which gives the viewer the sense of entering a dream without needing a theory to explain every object.

The movement includes Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes and René Magritte’s comic attacks on representation. Magritte’s The Treachery of Images shows a pipe beneath the sentence “This is Not a Pipe”. Surrealists also used automatic drawing, in which the hand moves freely across the page. hochelaga compares the method to scribbling and jokes that its artistic name gives an old activity a new status. The aim was to capture a moment of unconscious activity. The artists could never settle what the drawings had captured, and the uncertainty belongs to the method.

Illusion before the unconscious

Surrealism receives the credit for imaginative art, yet the video finds earlier forms of impossible imagery in the Renaissance. A book from 1568 contains geometric shapes that seem to study perspective rather than communicate a fixed meaning. Their spiralling forms recall the illogical stairways of M. C. Escher. Other artists placed faces inside landscapes and objects. Once the face appears, the viewer can see it again each time.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo made this effect into a subject. His portraits assemble a man from fruit, a woman from vegetables, and a librarian from books. The face exists at two levels at once. Individual objects keep their everyday identity whilst the whole arrangement becomes a person. The video connects this double reading to pareidolia, the human tendency to see faces in objects. Cars and houses can acquire expressions through the same process. The mind keeps making small images from whatever it sees.

An unconscious artist without consciousness

That observation leads to the video’s final turn. Human artists bring a conscious mind to their work, whilst artificial intelligence has no consciousness in the sense assumed by the video. DeepDream generates strange images by searching for faces. When its image-recognition system is trained to find dogs in the Mona Lisa, the painting becomes a psychedelic field of dog-like forms. A series using jellyfish shows the process building on its own distortions. Each pass sends the image further from the starting point.

DALL·E makes the connection to Surrealism explicit through its name. Like Dalí, the programme produces images from prompts and combinations that a person would struggle to picture in advance. hochelaga describes this as an attempt at unconscious art because the output can look dreamlike whilst the machine has no inner dream from which the image could come. The person supplying the prompt still provides the subject, and the programme remains dependent on human input in the video’s account.

The closing speculation extends the history beyond the present system. AI image-making is still young, and the video imagines a future in which an AI artist creates images from its own imagination. It might wake from a bad dream and paint what it saw, as Dürer did five centuries earlier. That possibility is a forecast about machine consciousness and agency. The current examples show pattern-making and image generation. They do not show an artificial inner life.

Limits

The video offers a brisk history of images that arise from dreams, hidden forms, or uncontrolled association. It moves from Dürer’s flood to Aboriginal Australian art, Egyptian and biblical visions, European nightmares, Japanese dream symbols, Redon, Freud, Surrealism, Renaissance illusion, and image-generating systems. The sequence gives those cases a shared subject, although the traditions themselves have different beliefs, methods, and historical conditions.

Several claims arrive without supporting references in the narration. These include the roughly two hours of nightly dreaming, the claim that Dürer’s watercolour is one of the earliest artistic representations of a dream, the meaning of resut, the relation between the mare and sleep paralysis, the symbolic readings associated with Freud, and the description of Aboriginal Australian art as the oldest unbroken artistic tradition. The video description supplies links for further reading, yet the note keeps these claims attached to hochelaga rather than treating the short programme as an independent history of dream art.

The final comparison has a clear limit. DeepDream and DALL·E can generate images that resemble hallucination, pareidolia, or dream imagery. Their output establishes a visual effect. It says nothing about a machine having dreams, desires, or a point of view. The imagined AI artist belongs to the video’s open question about creativity, rather than to evidence already shown.

Further reading / references

The video description names these links as sources or further reading:

• Dürer’s Apocalyptic Dream, Scientific American.
• The Art of Depicting Dreams, Artland.
• Art History’s Iconic Depictions of Dreams, Artsy.
• Odilon Redon’s artworks.
• Surrealism, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• DeepDream.
• DALL·E 2, OpenAI.