'Avatar' Director James Cameron on dreams

The director of 'Avatar', James Cameron, was interviewed by Terry Gross for Fresh Air on Feb. 18 and had interesting things to say about dreams.

A lot of the imagery in "Avatar" comes from dreams that I've had over time. I can remember distinctly having a dream in college of a glowing, bioluminescent forest and getting up and very quickly sketching it with oil pastels, trying to get the colors down, trying to get, you know, what I had imagined in the dream down on paper and feeling this great sense that I hadn't succeeded. It just was this ugly thing. It wasn't what I had seen in the dream.

So, you know, part of I think that's part of what drives a lot of artists is dream imagery and the kind of subconscious associations that happen in dreams.

I know the surrealist artists strongly believed that their mission was to translate to the canvas images they'd had in dreams without any attempt to analyze or mediate them and that that was kind of their ethos, and I kind of adopted a little bit of that when I was making "Avatar." I thought, you know, if I like an image, I'm going to put it in the movie, and Im not going to try to justify it.

So, you know, you see floating mountains in the film. They're never explained. Now, I happened to have, you know, sort of reverse-engineered a scientific explanation of how those mountains float, but every time I tried to shoehorn it into the movie, I just found that it was unnecessary explanation. People would accept that they had been transported to this amazing place where the rules were different, and it was okay for mountains to float. And it turned out that that technical explanation was completely unnecessary. 

The dream curator values blog posts that translate into words images from dreams without any attempt to analyze or mediate them.