Open Access

Christoph Gschwind

• Traumdarstellungen in Büchern und Filmen mit ›ambiguem‹ Ende sind in der Populärkultur seit den 1990er-Jahren beliebt. (Kuhn 2009, S. 141 f.) Man kann die Popularität solcher plot-Strukturen durchaus plausibel als Reaktion der Kunst auf die zunehmende Komplexität der Gesellschaft (Berndt / Koepnick 2018, S. 7) deuten. Diese Komplexitätssteigerung ergibt sich beispielsweise durch die Möglichkeiten digitaler Technologien, neben der wirklichen Welt auch virtuelle Welten, eine virtual, mixed oder augmented reality, zu kreieren, in denen sich die Grenze zwischen Realität und Fiktion verschiebt.
• Ambiguity is a key aesthetic and cultural cornerstone reflected in the multiple examples in literature, history and analysis that make the connection between the ambiguity of works of art and dream representations. This is particularly true in children's literature, in which children’s dreams are presented in pictures. This article focusses on picturebooks that question various interpretations of reality, whose ontology, in other words, is open to interpretation: Are the worlds represented through imagery fictionally true or imagined as a dream? It also aims to show that the ultimate openness of images to interpretation results from an indiscernible oscillation between ambiguation and disambiguation. The central hypothesis of the article states that these images have the potential to sensitise their audiences to ambiguity and thus promote its tolerance – even outside of literature. It posits that these images can support the development of ›ambiguity skills‹, understood here to refer to a child’s ability to handle perceived ambiguities productively, for instance by using them to examine basic anthropological questions, and is one means to prepare children for complex social ambiguities in real-life situations.