This is a documentary which investigates the genesis of mental images through dream processes, their typologies, their relationship to audiovisual media and theories about the latter. The electronic plastic treatment of the image, as well as the sound, and even, of the structure of the piece itself, is remarkable. The praxis of video itself participates in this investigation of the relationship between dreams and the moving image, and constructs its meaning.

The video REM. Estudios sobre el comportamiento nocturno is part of a series of experimental studies by Jacobo Sucari around the concept of thinking the image. Whereas the piece El efecto Kulechov  focuses on the physical relationship between images in the generation of thought, in REM, Sucari looks into the capacity of human beings to create our own images through dreams and unconscious states. Both forms of construction of the unconscious imaginary are displayed, on the one hand, the mental creation of images, as in film, and on the other, the linguistic propositions which we dream and which, when awake, take on an imaginary status, since our dreams are like the expression of our memory's tales, since there is no other way of knowing when and what we dream. What we dream is then immediately mediated either by audiovisual media or by our own memory.

This piece is situated within the field of the artistic or experimental documentary, what has been called the video essay. The different accounts and stories about and of dreams, in interviews with experts and researchers in dreams, coming from the fields of medicine, psychiatry and parallel medicine, establish the different levels of the discourse and the research in the piece.  For the production of this video, Sucari uses resources to think image and sound that were widely and positively considered during the 1990’s within the Barcelona milieu (as in the work by the collective 12ª visual). We can thus notice the use of appropriation and the systematic distortion of film and television images, which are then mixed with other images of the artist’s own production. The distortions that the electronic media create make up a plastics of image and sound. The synchronicity and use of these make up the syntactic and rhetoric pattern. The structure and production of this piece is part of the meta-linguistic tendency which freely identifies form and content. One of the ideas that this piece generates is that dreaming is an act similar to that of watching an artist’s video.