Abstract

Dream, as a theme, occupies an important place in the advertising imaginary. Advertising creates and sells dreams, which are controlled by the will and the principles of the consumer society (Rigolt, 2013). According to Michèle Jouve, advertising borrows from dreams their patterns and ingredients, having, as background, the dream in the waking state (the promised ideal of advertisements) and, as a form, the dream while sleeping (Jouve, 2000:248). In advertising, a dream creates symbols, one of the objects invested with the greatest number of signs being the perfume. The main persuasive vector of perfume advertisements is the image, which allows for multiple interpretations and announces a world placed at the border between dream and reality. Our paper performs an insight into the dream issues and proposes a possible analysis of the image of a perfume advertisement, whose concept, story and idea of promotion are built around the motif of the dream. It appears both explicitly, in the moments of the perfume launch event, with the product name and the ad text, and implicitly, in the interpretations that may appear with its reception. Through the multiple meanings it generates, the dream represents a border line between the coding of reality and the decoding that comes from the oneiric universe. The symbolic dimension in advertising hides appeals to both conscious and unconscious elements, and the image generated is, in fact, a hyper-reality.