Early film theorists such as
Ricciotto Canudo (1879–1923) and
Jean Epstein (1897–1953) argued that films had a dreamlike quality.
Raymond Bellour and
Guy Rosolato have made psychoanalytical analogies between films and the dream state, claiming films as having a "latent" content that can be
psychoanalyzed as if it were a dream.
Lydia Marinelli states that before the 1930s, psychoanalysts "primarily attempted to apply the interpretative schemata found in
Sigmund Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams to films." Author Douglas Fowler surmises that "images arising from dreams are the well spring of all our efforts to give enduring form and meaning to the urgencies within," seeing this as the reason why "the deep structure of human narrative is conceived in dreams and the genesis of all myth is dreams." Author Robert Eberwein describes the filmic experience as the merging of a viewer's consciousness with the projected consciousness of the screen's subject, a process whereby the viewer's prior experiences with dreaming "help to create a sense of oneness" with cinema, causing the gap between viewer and what is being viewed to narrow. Under this theory, no matter what is being shown on the screen — whether the literal representation of a character dreaming, or the fictional characters of a story going on about their fictional lives — the very process of viewing film itself "replicates activities associated with the oneiric experience." ==Filmmakers==