["For me, painting is a continuation of dreaming by different means" (Neo Rauch 2006). Contributions of art to psychoanalytic dream interpretation]

This paper maintains that pictorial and scenic thinking (represented in dreams, daydreams, paintings, pictorial language) is not a regressive phenomenon usurping ego energy. It is rather a kind of thinking with eyes, hands and feet resp. with formative means such as point, line, plane, space, movement, color, and contrast which constitute consciousness from the ocean of the inner and outer unconscious. This is shown by discussing the painting "Vater [Father]" (2007) of Neo Rauch as well as the views of, among others, Kandinsky, Klee, and Rothko. Rauch's notion of painting as a continuation of dreaming is confirmed by a re-analysis of Freud's dream of the "castle by the sea". Here dream-work is similar to picture and film work. The choice of formative means determines whether pictures will be born or something else: a dream, fantasy, idea or interpretation, and by the same token it determines the kind of picture, dream, fantasy etc. Freud's dream of the "castle by the sea" is a "specimen dream" for interpretation via retranslation of picture/dream-work.