Bristol academic wants you to tweet her your dreams
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Avatar: Directed by James Cameron and based on a dream he had in 1995
An expert from the University of the West of England (UWE) is taking part in a Twitter-based experiment today to analyse people’s dreams.
The experiment is to mark the online release of blockbuster movie Avatar today, which was based on a dream had by director James Cameron in 1995.
The UK-based movie streaming service www.blinkbox.com is inviting Twitter users to ‘tweet’ their dreams, with the chance to have them interpreted and analysed by UWE’s Dr Jennie Parker.
Tweeters need to tweet their dreams in 140 words or less to @dreamshrink from today, and Dr Parker will interpret 10Â tweeted dreams on Friday.
Dreams have played a pivotal role to James Cameron’s career from its early beginnings. While in Rome, during the making of Piranha II (his directorial debut in 1981), Cameron recalls: “I was sick, with a high fever and had a dream of this kind of chrome, metallic death figure coming out of a fire… kind of a skeletal robot, if you will.
“So I woke up with that image in mind, and did some drawings, then constructed a story around that image.”
The image became The Terminator — one of the most well-known movie science fiction films of all time.
Fifteen years later, Cameron’s subconscious was to shape his life significantly once more, when he dreamed of ‘the other Eden’ — now known to millions worldwide as ‘Pandora’.
The beautiful vision was brought to life through his development of the film Avatar, and promptly shattered all box office records. Avatar is the first film to gross more than $2billion, and swiftly stole the title of highest-grossing film of all-time from Titanic (not that Cameron should mind, having directed both).
Dr Parker says that she is thrilled to take part in the online release of Avatar. “This experiment is just so unique. What really excites me is that Twitter has not ever been used to collect data for dream research so this in itself is a ground breaking opportunity.
“I imagine that there will be thousands of people who are inspired to take part having been wowed by the beauty of the film. Even though I will be interpreting just ten dreams for the blinkbox.com experiment I can see the potential for so much more analysis.
“I am already planning to use data as the basis for a future book that will analyze the efficacy of Twitter as a means for data collection and hopefully present this information in a peer reviewed journal. This type of media is going to be essential in moving dream research forwards using state of the art technologies.”
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