The year 1895 was a key year in the histories of both psychoanalysis and cinema. On 24 July 1895, Freud dreamed the ‘Dream of Irma’s Injection’, the Specimen Dream of The Interpretation of Dreams. ‘Do you suppose’, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in a letter describing a later visit to Bellevue, the house where he had had the dream, ‘that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house’:

During September and October 1895, Freud wrote the uncompleted Project for a Scientific Psychology, which, as James Strachey noted in his editorial introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams, contains sections constituting a first approach to a coherent theory of dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams was, Freud himself claimed, ‘finished in all essentials at the beginning of 1896’.

The Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe gave its first public presentation (to the Société d’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale in Paris) on 22 March 1895, exhibiting their film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as an example of the progress being made in photography. Its immediate success was unexpected. The film is both the most unmediated of early actualité films, and a complex act of historical reflexivity: the workers at Lumière père’s photographic plate factory look into the camera, which would transform the very act of looking and turn still into moving images. George Méliès’s trick-films, which directly exploited the relationship between dream and film, followed soon after.