Federico Fellini’s “Book of Dreams”: He Drew His Dreams for Thirty Years — and Once Quit for Four

Fellini left behind two enormous notebooks. The first is 25 by 35 centimetres, around two hundred and forty-five pages; the second is larger still, 34 by 48. Both are covered edge to edge in handwriting and in drawings made with coloured pencils and felt-tip pens: women of operatic proportions, clowns, trains, the sea at night. These are not storyboards for his films. They are his dreams, which he wrote down and drew for more than thirty years. The story is worth going through honestly — because the most useful thing in it is not the part usually told.

The advice he was given in 1960

The habit did not start on its own. In early 1960 Fellini met Ernst Bernhard (1896–1965), a Jungian analyst, a German who had lived in Rome since 1936 and who effectively brought Jungian analysis to Italy. Bernhard advised him to do two things: consult the I Ching, and keep a record of his dreams. The first has nothing to do with our subject; the second turned out to be decisive. The analysis lasted until Bernhard’s death in 1965, and the habit lasted decades longer. Around the same time Fellini read Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections; how this work with inner images was organised in Jung’s own practice I have written about separately — active imagination.

What the object physically is

The first entry is dated 30 November 1960. The first volume runs to 2 August 1968 — roughly two hundred and forty-five pages. The second, in the larger format, begins in February 1973 and runs to 1982: one hundred and fifty-four pages. To these are added a scattering of loose sheets with notes dated 1990. The Book of Dreams was published in full only in 2007, by Rizzoli, edited by Vittorio Boarini and Tullio Kezich. In other words, almost nobody saw it while its author was alive: it was not a project or a future book, but a working notebook kept for himself.

The four years when he quit

Add the dates up and you see the thing almost nobody writes about. The first volume ends in August 1968; the second begins in February 1973. Between them lie four and a half years in which the diary simply does not exist. And after 1982 what remains is no longer a diary but loose sheets. So “thirty years of unbroken practice” is a handsome phrase and a false one. A man with the best reason in the world to keep going, and a personal Jungian analyst at the start of the road, quit for four years and came back.

I stress this deliberately. The story of a great man with a diary usually works in exactly the wrong direction: you read it, measure yourself against it, miss three days and conclude you are not cut out for this. Fellini missed four years. The diary did not stop being a diary — and the second volume, the largest and the most detailed, was written after the break. A gap is not the end of a practice. It is a gap.

Let us be plain: he did not control his dreams

Now the line that must not be blurred. Nowhere did Fellini claim to control his dreams. He did not describe lucid dreams, he left no technique, and he was not a practitioner in the sense in which a practitioner is someone who trains entry into a lucid dream. He was a witness with a pencil. If you came here for a way to turn dreams into cinema on demand “like Fellini,” he did not do that, and I am not going to pretend he did.

The link between the diary and the films also needs stating carefully. The years of the first volume are exactly the years of 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965), and scholars of his cinema examine that connection in detail. But examination is not documentation: you cannot point at a frame and say it grew out of this particular dream on the authority of the book itself. What is firm in this story is the dates, the object and the habit.

What he actually did

Set aside the question of what dreams mean and look at the mechanics. Fellini did exactly two things: he wrote the dream down immediately, and he drew it. The first half is ordinary diary discipline, and nothing works without it: everyone dreams, every night, and dreams vanish within minutes of waking — what is not written down does not exist as far as memory is concerned. The second half, the drawing, is not decoration. That is where the whole difference lies.

Why a drawing catches what words miss

Try describing a dream in words and you will notice you are writing plot: I went, I saw, I was frightened. Start drawing and you have to answer the questions prose walks past: where were you standing, what was on your left, how big was the room, was it light or dark, what colour. Those are precisely the details that are off in dreams — and precisely the ones that later become your own dream signs, the things by which a dream is recognised from inside. The drawing does not have to be good: Fellini was a professional, you are not, and it changes nothing. A crooked half-page diagram with an arrow and the words “this is where I realised I could not remember how I got here” works better than a tidy paragraph.

And the drawing has a side benefit that is rarely mentioned: it removes the main excuse. “I do not have time to write it down, the dream is going” — a drawing is faster than a sentence. Three lines and one word beside them preserve more than a correct sentence you never began.

Where to start

Start with the same instrument Fellini had: keep a dream journal and write on waking, without getting up and without opening your phone — and leave room on the page for a drawing, even if you cannot draw. In two or three weeks you will have material, and in it your recurring dream signs will start to show: the places, people and situations that come back specifically to you. Then add reality checks during the day and MILD before sleep, so that awareness crosses the threshold with you and not only images. From there lucid dreaming opens up, and inside it you need a separate skill — holding the state.

How to walk this path with guidance

Fellini had Bernhard — someone who told him what to do with all this and was there for five years. After that he was on his own and, judging by the four-year gap, did not always manage. You have an advantage: the same skills — dream recall, observation, awareness inside the dream — are today assembled into a clear sequence you can work through calmly, step by step. If you would like to walk it with guidance, read about my method and apply.