Book excerpt: ​This book demonstrates how social distress or anxiety is reflected, modified, and evolves through the medium of the motion picture. Tracing cinema from its earliest forms, the authors show how film is a perfect medium for generating and projecting dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, on the individual as well as the societal level. Arising at the same time as Freud’s influential ideas, cinema has been intertwined with the wishes and fears of the greater culture and has served as a means of experiencing those feelings in a communal and taming environment. From Munsterberg’s original pronouncements in the early 20th century about the psychology of cinema, through the pioneering films of Melies, the works of the German expressionists, to James Bond and today’s superheroes this book weaves a narrative highlighting the importance of the social dream. It develops the idea that no art form goes beyond the ordinary process of consciousness in the same way as film, reflecting, as it does, the cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects of human nature.​