192 Film and Philosophy 17, 2012, pp. 192–203. “Film Thinks!” What about Dreams? A Reading of Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy By Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Introduction In Filmosophy 1 , Daniel Frampton inaugurates a new way of perceiving the reality of film by insisting that film does not narrate or show things, characters or actions; it thinks them. Frampton contends that we observe a thinking process while watching a film, and he attempts to grasp this cinematic thinking process with the help of newly coined concepts such as ‘film- thinking’ and ‘filmind’. Finally, he assigns to ‘filmosophy’ the task of “conceptualizing all film as an organic intelligence.” 2 In this article I show that everything that Frampton points out about film being an autonomous cognitive realm can also be said about dream. Just like films, dreams represent an autonomous reality that functions independently of our imaginative and narrative inputs. Frampton dismisses the possibility that dream can fulfill the function of a filmind; for him, the “film as dream” discussion inaugurates no more than psychoanalytical perceptions of “subconscious film”. However, the filmind is the reality as it is experienced by the spectator in the same way in which the dream reality is the reality experienced by the dreamer. The dream reality is not the reproduction of some “exterior” reality, but it is its own world with its own intentions and its own creativity. I show this by pointing to non-essentializing accounts of dreams current in the writings of the French poet Paul Valéry and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, as well as by discussing the filmind in the context of far-Eastern definitions of dreams. Film-Thinking Frampton explains that film-thinking is not a metaphorical way of arranging reality but that “the filmind has its own particular film-phenomenology, its own way of attending to its world (it thinks a loved woman with soft-focus, we do not).” 3 Film does not simply show fictional daydreaming and imaginings, but is able to carry out functions that can best be