In 1926, soon after the Society was founded, its first president and founder Albert Grass proposed that members attempt to recreate their dreams on film and analyze them. He had worked as a cameraman in Signal Corp during World War I and returned to Brooklyn with technical expertise. When Kodak produced the first 16mm camera and the new 'safety film' in 1923, the medium was born for the amateur. Grass was ready to initiate members of the Society into the mysteries of cinematography and Freudian theory. He firmly believed that the films would prove Freud's dictum that dreams are always the disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish.

His speech at the first prize giving ceremony makes this clear, "Sigmund Freud has written that the royal road to the unconscious lies in our dreams. Each night we are plunged into a fantastical world as amazing as anything we see in Saturday night Photoplays. But how to capture the most effervescent of experiences so that they can be properly analyzed and recorded for future generations? The answer, my friends, lies in our new tools, the Cine-Kodak Camera and the Kodascope Projector enabling us to reenact our dreams on film, producing a perfect reproduction of our mind's nocturnal wanderings, the strange adventures of our souls. As it will surely be soon with sound and color to perfect the illusion, we will open up our darkest dreams to the bright light of reason"

Here is a selection of nine award winning dream films.

Click on a title to see a movie