9/23 Questions

• The Ringstraße is a street in Vienna which served as a sort of cultural and artistic center for the city, and today has a very strong connection to the Secession.
• The Secession was a movement in art that broke away from the traditional art school so they could practice new ideas in art. Their motto is , to paraphrase, that each era has its own style. The building, also titled the Secession, opened in 1899, the same year of Johann Strauß's death.
• Klimt was respected by much of the bourgeois. Many women of that class considered it to be a sign of their status to be painted by him.
• Gustav Mahler was the director of the Viennese Opera during its Golden Period.
• There were around 700 coffee shops in 1904. They provided and continue to provide meeting places for the citizens.
• At this time, the Jews were starting to really experience anti-semitism. It was nowhere near the extreme it would be by World War II, but it was still prevalent enough to make life harder for those of Jewish descent.
• Knowing that most of Freud's work has been more or less debunked by modern psychology made me read through his interpretations with great caution. However, a lot of it made sense. He put a lot of real-life context into many elements of a dream, such as where he was living at the time and who he was associating with. Many people do have dreams like this, so it makes sense.
• I find the analysis pretty grounded in reality, as opposed to a sort of representational and/or abstract thing that many people try to use to interpret dreams these days (For example, according to dreamstop.com, dreaming of the sun could potentially mean blessings). I kind of like that, but at the same time, I felt like there was much less focus on analyzing the dreams themselves.
• I do feel that this text is important because keeping a scientific record keeps us moving forward, and it is still a pretty interesting theory to consider when trying to explain our own dreams.
• I honestly cannot remember most to all of my dreams, so unfortunately, I cannot analyze a recent one using Freud's methods. I'll have to write down a dream the next time I wake up. And even when I do, rarely do I remember these dreams in such detail.