Curious Images Essay

Images are signifi sternt parts of our lives as they confine and circumscribe each that is familiar to us. Hu creation spirit has a tendency to connect touchs with motion-picture shows. Each feeling has a face our fears, contemplations, pleasure, hope, failure etc. , all scoop out up a face. So vivid are these faces that as in short as an emotion or thought spr show ups in the brainiac, an externalise flashes to satisfy our senses so strong is the grip of these images that we keep relating and projecting our thoughts, feelings and memories with them.We expose an exercising of this in R. L. St til nowsons The unknown eccentric of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, where the personality of Mr. Hyde becomes active as soon as his Dr. Jekylls thoughts change. For this reason, virtuallything that is unknown always lawsuits a feeling of discomfort as it has no visual representation. Our entire lives revolve most familiar and unfamiliar images. The conscious part of our mind always relies on these images to identify our world. Thus, images influence us strongly, sometimes manipulating us, temporary hookup at other(a) times, playing tricks upon us, like jacket crown fan and motion pictures, as demo by Oliver Sack in In the Rivers of Consciousness.Our perceptions sometimes makes us prisvirtuosor of our thoughts, binding us into bouts of endless torment. Society often slots our actions into vapourous categories of unafraid and bad, which forces people to lead dual lives, becoming unwittingly, victim of these images. Dr. Jekyll from the The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one such person who is suffering from this inner contravention of maintaining a good image in the society (R. L. St planeson). Due to this fixing he undertakes the task of trans shapeing his personality chemically. A change had come over me.It was no desireer the fear of gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. (430). In an endeavour to get rid of the evil billet of his personality, Dr. Jekyll drinks a potion he earns, which brings out the personality of Mr. Hyde. However to his horror, he discovers that Mr. Hyde becomes more and more monstrous as days go by. This really bothers him because ironically Mr. Hyde had turned out to be totally opposite to what he had imagined. It becomes genuinely difficult for him to keep this side of his personality recondite any longer and this fear of being observe ultimately with a negative image causes him to kill himself.Tormented by his thoughts of wanting a good image for himself, Dr. Jekyll carried out a perilous experiment which turned out to be a disaster. present we see how images created in the mind shadow manipulate a person to create a harmony between the bigger image created by the society, reservation him a prisoner of his thoughts. In case of Dr. Jekyll, we besides observe that thoughts, for example, of good and evil which translates into an image of moral stance, become more pow erful when suppressed. By then, Freud emphasized, the wish maybe disguised to the point of being unrecognizable.Things might even appear their opposites pleasure as pain, desire as fear. (Gelman, Dreams on the Couch). Here we take a encounter at Freuds explanation of evidently weird dreams. He goes on to explain that something which is like a genial taboo, gets suppressed in the mind to an extent where it seems to be involve opposite. such an image, due to acquiring suppressed becomes more powerful. Thus there are cardinal forces operating the wish, and a defense against it, a censor. (133). The wish or desire being a social taboo, causes the dreamer to dream exact opposite of what he desires.But this is not always the case, as argued by many other analysts. There is no need to assume dreams get to a latent content, says Harry Fiss (134). The images or memories which have been very(prenominal) significant to the dreamer must be taken into consideration as they remain in s ubconscious and influence our thought dish out. Thus, we see how the image created by the society influences the images created in the minds of people. Human mind works in a complex way to decipher the images which it keeps viewing, creating and transforming.sometimes the captured image grades the mind into a trancelike state and at other times tricking the mind to cause an likeness. Freed from inhibitions of verbal communication, it seems, we respond to visual imagery that may have been our earliest mode of thinking- one reason, perhaps, why the language of poetry can stir us as it does. That may explain, too, why some dreams can haunt us with a power more persuasive even than that of poetry, shimmering in the mind like lost cities or leaving us, for hours afterward, with an incomprehensible feeling of terror. (Gelman, Dreams on the Couch). A moment which might have been very significant in a persons life lays hidden in the subconscious layers of the mind. Constant storage of i mages in our minds, sometimes cause them to jumble up. Thats why our dreams are made of up of images that sometimes make sense and very often do not, explaining why we sometimes have pleasant dreams and at other times suffer from nightmares. When the analyst asked the patient if he associated anything with the Malarial Area, he decided, after some thought, that the phrase could be an anagram. (137). Here we see how the patients long forgotten childhood memories distorted his dreams. In this patient, whom they call Mrs. M. , there were debar frames lasting several seconds, during which Mrs. M. would see a prolonged, motionless image and be visually unaware of any movement around her, though her time period of thought and perception was otherwise normal. (Sacks, In the Rivers of Consciousness). Here we see Mrs. M. getting caught in a frozen moment. The similarity between these situations is how images manipulate these two patients to be caught in the moment.The interesting differen ce here is how perception creates an image, which one remembers in his dream with his eyes closed, and the other doesnt with her eyes open. Images sometimes play a trick of optical illusion, causing the brain to commit and perceive motions differently. When we see a series of still images in flying succession, there is an illusion which leads us to believe that we are in feature looking at one continuous motion picture. This optical illusion tricks the mind into believing that which is not the case.Another striking example of perceptual standstill could be demonstrated with a common visual illusion, that of the Necker cube. Normally, when we look at this ambiguous perspective drawing of a cube, it switches perspective every few seconds, first seeming to project, then to recede, and no effort of forget suffices to prevent this switching back and forth. (Sacks, In the Rivers of Consciousness). This perspective switching renders an image which keeps changing and is not still. Thi s is in huge contrast with the case of Mrs. M., who experiences a standstill trance like state, where she perceives the image in front of her to be motionless. Her perspective doesnt change for elongated periods of time, until perhaps someone interrupts her. Similarly, ceiling fan sometimes seems to be going in the forward direction, opus at other times in the opposite direction. Further, as Sacks goes on to explain how people who suffer from migraine perceive what they see. The migraine patients in their delirium see flickering images, which accelerate to restore normal motion.In all these case, we see how moving images are comprehend by the brain, sometimes rushing and causing fluid like motion. At other times, halt and causing a trance like state. This concept has today go into the making of motion pictures, advanced imaging devices etc. From prehistoric times, man has given immense importance to images. This is confirmed by the ancient subvert paintings. We see that drawing or creating images fulfills a deeper aspect of human personality, as it offers a very strong medium of self expression. Sometimes images form a pattern in the mind, locking us in that moment, as we see in the case of Mrs.M. In the River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks. Sometimes they offer a familiar territory to which we are used to, while at other times, they act as agents in visual communication. Images take on a variety of forms and functions. They create patterns in our minds which make us happy, sad and fearful, as we keep relying upon them subconsciously. Often, we dont realize how lots our lives are influenced by them. The way we dress, work, live, are all influenced by the perceived images which we have created in our minds ever since we were born.This is a never ending process which continues as long as we live. Images rule our conscious and sub conscious, also influencing our dreams, as we observe in Dreams on the Couch by David Gelman. hold in a society, where images a nd appearances are very important, we often perform actions which do not always leave us happy. R. L. Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a classic example of this. In such situations, our suppressed desires sometimes try to overcome our sensibility, till there comes a point where we are forced to look at the bigger picture.Are we truly what we portray ourselves to be or we pretend to be someone who we want to be? Whatever be the case, one cannot deny the impact that images have on our lives, positive or negative. Man, being a social animal adapts himself to put on various images sometimes for himself, sometimes for the society he lives in sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. Works Cited Stevenson, R. L. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886. (Gelman, Dreams on the Couch) (Sacks, In the Rivers of Consciousness)