Verdict?

It was pretty awesome.

In fact, I’d say this is the best film that’s come along that is specifically about dreams and the architecture of the dreaming mind since Vanilla Sky was released in 2001.

Instead of a movie review, I just want to bring up some points of the film that intrigue me. If you’ve not seen the movie, I don’t know if you will want to read any further!

…still with me?

OK, here we go!

1) The use of dreams signs.

Sort of.

But if you’ve seen the film and you’re familiar with lucid dreaming, you probably know what I’m referencing: in the movie they use small, unique objects that only they know something distinct about. Because of this uniqueness, they are used as a test of their reality, since someone else designing their dreamscape or dream landscape would be unable to replicate what’s unique about the object, and thus, the dreamer would know this meant the experience is a dream.

I thought this was very cool twist on the lucid dreaming community’s use of dream signs as a way to test reality to realize you’re dreaming.

2) The discussion on how dreams just “start” without a beginning.

In the beginning of the film, Leonardo Dicaprio is training his new dream architect and asks her how they got to where they are now. She cannot remember and realizes that they are actually in a dream right then and there.

This is definitely something familiar to lucid dreamers as a means of lucid dream induction. i.e. to train yourself to  ask the question “How did I get here? What was I doing 20 minutes ago?” so that you do it while dreaming, and it becomes a lucid dream cue.

This is very cool and I don’t believe I’ve seen any film on dreams mention this concept.

3) The huge use of dreams within dreams and false awakenings.

The idea that within each dream inside a dream one is closer to both the subconscious and an increasingly unstable dreamscape is awesome. They did a really good job on this one I think.

4) The nature of dream time.

The idea that dream time gets exponentially longer as you move down each level of a dream within a dream was very clever both as a plot device and just as an idea on dreams.

But I couldn’t help thinking of Stephen LaBerge’s lucid dream experiments where they had a subject fall asleep, become lucid, cue the outside world that they were lucid (I believe with pre-approved motions of their eyes, which move in real life parallel with the subjects dream movements) and then count from 1 to 30 followed by a second eye movement cue to signal the count is complete. From what I recall, the research found that the time experienced in the subjects dream was basically the same as the time experienced outside of the dream.

In other words, time passes the same in a dream as it does when awake.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all dreams experience time like this, does it? Perhaps it was just that one dreamers experience and that specific dream.

For me personally, I’ve never had a dream experience that led me to believe that time can stretch in huge ways in the dream world. But I have had visitors here discuss in the comments that they’ve had dreams that lasted years or entire lifetimes – something I must admit I find hard to believe, but nevertheless, am eager to hear about.

Do you have dream experiences that stretch the concept of time?

5) The notion that characters in our dreams are projections of our subconscious.

Yep, they hit the nail on the head with that one and it was nice to see it be a strong part of the story. I loved how the dream characters became resistant to the people coming into the dreams when they sensed someone was messing with their world, like a subconscious psychological defense of the dreaming mind.

. . .

All in all, a kick ass movie about dreaming, for sure!

If you’ve seen the Inception dream movie already, I’d love to know what you think!

Did they “got it right”?

What did you like or dislike?

How does it compare to other movies about dreams?

And most importantly, did you think it was a little silly how many people they had shooting machine guns at each other while skiing on a mountain side? I did..

Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

Lots of people have their personal nightmare; you know, the one that re-occurs overs the years, the one that horrifies them to the core, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem very scary when talking about it.

Mine is something most people are familiar with: the 1970′s horror film, The Exorcist.

When I was 10 years old I saw The Exorcist. It was on TV and I watched it with my brothers. Not wanting to look weak in front of them, I acted brave; oh no, this movie doesn’t scare me!

The truth is, it scared the living shit out my 10 year old self. I vividly remember being scared of possession, so much that I  purposely slept in a crooked position because of those scenes in The Exorcist where they showed her body floating in the air, possessed, straight as a nail. I thought if I slept straight I would be more susceptible to demon possession.

This fear slowly dissipated in its intensity over the years; but instead of becoming something I ignorantly feared, it just turned into a fear deep in my head, somewhere. The only place it had to come out was my dreams. You know, that wonderful place where logic doesn’t apply so well like it does it the real world to contain our fears.

That little girl from The Exorcist has now appeared in my dreams for years, making many a guest appearance. The dreams are some of scariest I’ve ever had. It did not help that last year I read the book – which, mind you, I thought was a brilliantly written piece of fiction, and by far the most elegantly disturbing horror novel I’ve ever read – but reading this book absolutely planted her little seed in my head again and she made quite a few appearances in that time frame.

I thought it’d be interesting to share one of those dreams. This dream is special in that it also includes someone whom I have much admiration for, a friend named Juan who wrote about his experiences in Peru under a shaman and allowed me to share it on Dreaming Life for which I’m very thankful. His appearance in this dream is very intriguing to me. (You can read more about his experiences here.)

Here’s what I wrote in my dream journal in February 2009 about a dream with Juan and the demon from The Exorcist. In ths dream, she is in the next room chained to a bed when I get something from Juan in the mail and then have to into her room for some reason.

I’ve received a package in the mail from Juan. It contains various shamanic plants, including ayahausca. His letter says we must have the girl come stay with him immediately or she will die. He will perform a shamanic ritual in order to save her. But the thing is, I know she is already dead.

I have to go through her room to get something. I am terribly scared of her. I walk through her room and she watches; intently, intelligently.

I do not make eye contact, but I can feel her eyes on me. I am pulled into returning her stare.

She’s lying on the bed. Her face is pale, with blue and white rings. She is terrifying to witness.

There is an electrifying, intelligent look in her face beyond the years of a young girl.

I wake up in fear.

I added after this some commentary:

The energy of the little girl – the demo – was so sharp, so focused – her eyes were on my like a wild animal stalking its prey. And the color of her skin, a pale blue and white blended together, similar to the color contrasts I’ve been using in my art. A visually and emotionally captivating dream experience. I finished reading the Exorcist book about 2 weeks ago – fascinating how the fear lurks in my mind and comes out so much later in this dream.

Isn’t it amazing how something we saw that scared as children can haunt is our dreams as adults?

Much in the same way of what I wrote about recently in that there’s a goddess archetype that developed in my dreams over the years, this demonic little girl from the Exorcist has become a kind of reoccurring nightmare concept that has appeared in my dreams on and off for more than a decade.

It gives me the creeps just writing about it and thinking about her.

Alive Mind Media is releasing 3 films this summer, dubbing the release “The Trippy Trilogy – Alive Mind’s Altered Consciousness Collection”.

Flicker
DVD release Date: July 15

Documentary on the 1961 invention of Brion Gysin’s “Dreammachine”, described as “a hypnotic light device with the power to induce hallucinations.” (Is this a precursor to the Sound and Light Machine?)

Hofmann’s Potion
DVD release Date:  June 15

Documentary on LSD featuring Albert Hofmann, Timonthy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner Stanisav Grof, and more.
Preview:

Hofmann’s Potion – 9 Minute Preview

Hippie Masala
DVD Release Date: August 8, 2008

Official Description:

“In the 1960s and 1970s thousands of hippies journeyed East in the search for enlightenment, free drugs or a ‘pure’ life. Indian peasants assumed that a severe drought in the West was the reason for their migration. India’s holy men saw it, more accurately, as a search for spirituality. Most moved back to their home countries after a few months or years. Some stayed for good. Hippie Masala shows aging flower children who, after fleeing Western civilization, found a new home in India.”

Hippie Masala Trailer:

Check out the Alive Mind Media site for complete info, including links to buying any of these DVD’s.

I really hope Hippie Masala comes to my local indie theatre, because it looks super fascinating!

The Island by balt-arts

In keeping with this weeks earlier posts on movies, I decided to list all the good dream and lucid dream themed films out there!

If you are interested in dreams, I think you’ll find these movies worth watching.

Let me know what you think!

You might notice some of these movies bleed into other mind-related themes. My study of dreams naturally leads to a fascination with consciousness and states of mind, and so my movie list naturally reflects that in as much as it ties back into my fascination with dreams.

1. Vanilla Sky (2001)
– The most popular movie to introduce the concept of lucid dreaming to the masses. Although, to be fair, the movie does play loose with the idea of lucid dreaming – i.e. he doesn’t really know he’s dreaming, he’s just mapped out intentionally a dream life that he wants to have, and then falls into it, unconsciously, and lives his life. I love this movie. I still remember the first time I saw it at a friends house. I literally was ready to watch it again from start to finish as soon as it ended.

…

2. Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) (1997)
– This is the original Spanish version of Vanilla Sky. I‘m really not trying to collect hipster points by saying this version is better, but it might just be better, to be honest. There are certain scenes in the original version that are cooler than any scene in the Hollywood version. For instance, I where he runs out of the building to the outdoors screaming “I want to wake up” was just awesome. Watching this, I understood how it might feel to be completely delusional and kill people, that to you, aren’t even real, but just characters in what you now recognize is an illusion.

By the way, Penelope Cruz is in this version, too. Weird eh?

…

3. Waking Life (2001)
– This movie is incomparable to anything else. The entire film issequences of intense philosophical dialogues on dreams and reality. I found it disjointed and sometimes hard to follow, but overall fascinating. Adding to the dizzying dialogue, the film uses this strange animation technique where they film real people and added animation over this footage. The result is a strange combination where everything looks real but you know it’s not.

I’ve written more about Waking life here.

…

4. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Ah, David Lynch! The master of fucked up films! I adore his work and I think Mulholland Drive is a masterpiece.

This film has been interpreted in a million different ways and for good reason, as Lynch is a master at open-ended film making where nothing really makes sense, even when you briefly think it does.

I like approaching this as if it’s a sequence of different dreams all loosely connected. Notice how within each scene, what’s happening seems incredibly meaningful and consequential, often with a corresponding overwhelming flow of emotions. What’s literally happening in the scene doesn’t necessarily translate to what’s meaningfully or “emotionally” happening, yet there’s this connection between the two somehow.

This level of disjointedness between what’s happening and what’s being felt is so common in dreams.

When the next scene comes along, it starts all over again and it’s not necessarily related to the scene before or after, but again, while it’s happening it feels incredibly meaningful and important.

This is very much like a night of dreams that you feel are related but don’t really make sense, yet at the time, it all made sense to you, complete with the added bonus of baffling emotions.

I’ve written some more about dreams and David Lynch’s films here.

…

5. Science of Sleep (2006)
– This a cute love story wrapped around a dream-theme. The previews made it look more about dreams and the dream world than it really is. I absolutely love the scene where he falls asleep talking on the phone, and then, fully conscious in the dream state, continues the phone conversation excitedly, reporting what he’s seeing in the dream. (The camera then shows him sleeping silently with the phone near his head.) Ironically, after seeing this movie I had a dream about this character and it did not trigger anything in me to ask “Wait a minute…am I dreaming?”

…

6. Altered States (1980)
Hippy culture within academia, sense deprivation tanks, religious ramblings, and lots and lots of drugs make for one interesting sci-fl flick. Loosely based on the work of researcher and ketamine-happy John Lily.

I’ve written more about Altered States here.

By the way, this movie was voted in the Top 100 Sci-Fi Films of All Time, so I guess that makes it a classic, eh?

…

7. eXistenZ (1999)
Sci-fi movie about virtual reality and…well, you can guess where it goes from there. I didn’t really like it, but a lot of people do.

…

8. Stay (2005)
– This film blends up the reality between a therapist and his patient and offers another wrap-around plot.

It does get surprisingly strange with some really odd, bizarre sequences for such a mainstream film.

The acting by Ryan Gosling is beautifully crafted, so much so that his depressed & suicidal character is so well acted that I felt a bit like him when it was all over.

…

And Some Dream-Related Movies I Haven’t Seen But Would Like Too…

The Good Night (2007)
– Penelope Cruz again stars in a film about dreams and lucid dreaming. Lots of big names in this film – I wonder if it was popular or will be popular? Too be honest I’m not even sure if in the States it’s hit the theatres yet or already came and went. (I am out of it when it comes to popular culture, so to speak.) I definitely gotta see this though. The plot centers around a man who falls in love with a girl literally in his dreams, and then finds her in real life.

I find it amusing that Danny Devito is supposedly this crazy, nutty lucid dreaming guru in the film. Like we’re all crazy in the head, eh? Sure…

…

Wide Awake and Dreaming (2003) – Does anyone know anything about this black and white film on lucid dreaming? All I can find is this entry on IMDB. I would like to know more.

…

Some Japanimation Film I Can’t Remember the Name of (2007)
– And google is not being cooperative. Does anyone know what I’m talking? There was a semi-independent japanimation film – or at least I think that’s the correct genre – that came out this year, related to dreams and lucid dreaming. I believe the lead character was female. I meant to see it, never did, and now I cannot find out anything else since I cannot remember it’s name. Dammit.

Update 12/8/2007: This movie is called Paprika! Check out this post on Paprika at Reality Shifter for a great review.

…

Lucid (2006) – Another film I’ve found from searching online for lucid dreaming movies. Not much info out there but I am intrigued that this is called a “black indie film” at Amazon
. The movie poster and tagline look horror-esque.

…

The Door (2005) – A thriller about lucid dreaming and shared dreams. Looks worth watching. If Netflix has it, I will get it soon. I found a review of it here and here’s the official website for The Door.

…

So, what did I miss?

What do you think of the movies in this list?
What’s your favorite dream movie?

P.S. If you like these movies, I bet you’ll also dig Donnie Darko, even though it doesn’t really have anything to do with dreams, it’s just weird.

Update July 2010: The Inception movie absolutely deserves to be on this list too. Freaking awesome film!

Photo by balt-arts

The story revolves around a young scientist named Eddie Jessup, whose interest in his work overshadows everything else, including not only his marriage to but even his own well-being.

I read that the actors experimented with ketamine while making this film. I thought this was strange but awesome of them. Later on I discovered why they did it; ALTERED STATES is based on the life and work of scientist, writer, and ketamine-enthusiast John Lilly.

I did some searching and found an incredibly fascinating interview with John Lily interview on the Erowid archives, originally appearing in Omni magazine, about his life and his work and a bit on the film Altered States.

Learning more about Lily’s personality, life, and work made me appreciate this film even more. He, just like the character in Altered States, was driven nearly to madness, and almost to his death, for his passionate and all-consuming interest in exploring his own mind with drugs. This was no joke to him. I was astonished to learn that Lily once spent 100 days straight on ketamine.

Despite the fact that this makes him sound like a crackpot, he was a real scientist with a number of mainstream accomplishments under his belt. He is credited with inventing the sensory deprivation tank in order to learn if the brain needed external stimuli to “stay awake.” He also devoted much research into inventing a technique for communication between humans and dolphins. (I would very much like to know where this research went; in the interview, nearly 25 years ago, he states that we’re about five years away from breaking the language barrier between humans and dolphins.) He also published many books over the years on his own experiences and scientific research.

….

I loved ALTERED STATES from the very beginning – the sense deprivation tank, the crazy drug trips, the religious nature of his hallucinations (including burning crosses, visions of hell, and scenes from the Book of Revelations). I also enjoyed spotting the side references to Charles Tart, Timothy Leary, and amanita muscaria. (And being that I was born in 1980, I’m sure I missed quite a few other things key to 60′s and 70′s drug culture.)

The plot moves along pretty quickly and goes something like this:

• After attending a shamanic religious ritual and tripping with a bunch of Indians, Eddie brings back a few grams of the drug for scientific analysis.

• Once he combines this unknown drug with the sensory deprivation tank, the movie really kicks up it’s psychedelic heels and takes you for a crazy ride.

• At this point, these trips in the tank have become much more than just journeys of the mind. The combination of the sensory deprivation tank with this unknown drug allow him to tap into the genetic history contained within every cell of his body. First he regresses into a primal, pre-human ape-like creature. Ultimately, by the end of the film, he regresses back to the very beginning of existence itself, terrified by the overwhelming nothing that he becomes one with, and saved from it only by his love for his wife, Emily.

Some of the imagery is fitting for a horror film and I certainly don’t recommend anyone trip while watching this fun. Ultimately this film is a throwback to a post-60’s scientific culture when scientists were allowed to experiment with mind-altering substances in the lab. If you’ll excuse some of the cheesy dialogue and the under-developed romance between Eddie and Emily, you’ll find a fascinating film about drugs, the brain, and the nature of reality.

Sidenote: I’ve not had the chance to get inside a sensory deprivation tank but would really enjoy doing so. I would love to hear from you if you’ve had a chance to use one. I’d also be curious to know where it is and how you were able to use it. Maybe you’d want to write something about your experience and we can post it on the blog?

“Holy shit – this movie really is all about lucid dreaming!”

“What the fuck was that guy talking about?”

“This is really awesome and yet sometimes really boring.”

“This guy talking about how turning on or off a light in a dream and how it won’t work – I love this scene. And 360 vision – hell yea!”

“This crazy animation style is going to give me a headache!”

“I need to watch this movie again and take notes.”

This isn’t a normal movie with character development, a climax, and so on – it’s more like a philosophical look at dreams, waking life, and reality. It’s about a guy seemingly lost in a dreamworld, wondering from dream to dream, sometimes thinking he’s awake, and sometimes knowing he’s in a dream. He meets different people everywhere he goes, and the ensuing conversations leave you confused, intrigued, and excited.

These conversations cover a lot of ground. For those interested in spending some time with the themes of the movie, the Waking Life script is online here.

This is a rare type of film, both in content and technique, whose shortcomings are made up for it’s ability to get you thinking about something you’ve probably never thought before.

My Favorite Scene

Some Quotes

Doesn’t it make sense that death too would be wrapped in a dream? That after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called a dream body?”

“There’s only one instant, and it’s right now, and it’s eternity.”

“They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn’t you say the same thing about life?”

“Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free. “

(More Waking Life quotes)

PS. It is purely a coincidence that this film is called Waking Life and then I come out with a blog called Dreaming Life. I actually came to this name while writing down my dreams and found it to be an efficient term to designate something that happened while sleeping. I wasn’t aware of the film Waking Life at the time.

Please tell us about you film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within. What’s it about and why did you decide to make it?

The film Entheo:genesis is about discovering the ways in which we participate with the dance and flow of life— and how to maintain that flow. The film also gives us context from our history— from the evolution from indigenous tribes through shamanism through world religions throughout the course of history. Also how our civilization has participated with meaning, inspiration, and the grand metaphysical questions. We end the film with a contemporary perspective of the post-modern technosphere, which is cancerous on our biosphere, which we are embedded in and a big part of.

What was it like working with the likes of Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck, and other well-known figures in the entheogen and shamanic communities?

One of the greatest peripheral benefits of creating a piece like Entheo:genesis is having the opportunity to sit one-on-one in dialogue with some of the most inspirational minds and hearts–our elders on this planets. It was a tremendous honor to be able to work with and spend the countless hours in the editing room with reviewing these interviews and subjects vs. a thirty hour piece on the evolution of hula hoop in southern California. I’m not saying the hula hoop is not interesting. I like the hula hoop as much as the next man or woman does. I’m saying spending hours editing hula hoops in the hula hoop world would be my second choice if given the choice between these two.

I really love the subtitle Awakening the Divine Within, as it hints at the potential of entheogens to manifest mystical states of being. In that respect, what are your thoughts on the role of entheogens as a tool for spiritual exploration? Are these experiences legitimate expressions of spirituality?

I think entheogens can play an integral role in the birthing process of an individual who is coming from adolescence into adulthood. I think there are a lot of 30, 40 and 50 years olds walking around on the street still encapsulated in an adolescent mentality. Having the opportunity to study indigenous and shamanic use of entheogens as initiatory substances, I gained a profound respect for the sacred participation, and the sacred intentionality, which must be present in a journey of this sort. I believe that entheogens are not for everyone. I believe entheogens must be respected and in the right context, set, and setting, with the right intention. They can be an extremely potant catalyst for self-exploration, psychological processing, and spiritual reawakening.

Psychonauts can get divided over terms like entheogen, hallucinogen, psychedelic, dissociative, etc. What that in mind, what makes a substance an Entheogen?

Traditionally, entheogens describe plant based hallucinogens, which would include Salvia, Iboga, Ayahuasca, Psylocibin, San Pedro, etc.

Many people describe out of body experiences (OOBE) with entheogens such as Salvia Divinorum and Ayahausca. This aspect of the “drug experience” endlessly fascinates me and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on OOBE’s.

Well, I think that any entheogen or substance which induces an out of body experience yields one very important realization, which is that we are not our bodies, and there is some greater understanding of the psyche or the soul. Out of body experiences aren’t always limited to use of entheogens. There’s a great article here that offers new research— the article claims out of body experiences can be achieved using sensory deprivation with virtual reality goggles.

What do you think Entheogens can tell us about our own consciousness and sense of self?

I think that entheogens offer us a window into the deeper dimensions of our Self, our psyches, our behaviors, our subconscious patterns, and we may use these substances in the proper context of course, to do the necessary work, the individuation, bringing a sense of awareness to ego inflation and self importance so that through that process we may gain a stronger sense of our community and our families, and also regarding other species, plants, etc.—how we fit into the sempiternal interconnected web of life which sustains the whole of existence.

How have Entheogens shaped your worldview and affected you as a person?

Entheogens have had a tremendous impact on my worldview as some of the most potent experiences including inspiration of the most divine nature to isolation of the most fearful… I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue my practice on my own path, which includes evermore intention structure and absence of structure, gratitude and prayer when I journey.

Official Site: (DVD available for purchase here)

http://entheogen.tv/

Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within

Below is a 9 minute trailer video for the film ENTHEOGEN: Awakening the Divine Within.

I’ll be posting an interview with director Rod Mann later this week!

Official description:

“Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a feature length documentary which invites the viewer to rediscover an enchanted cosmos in the modern world by awakening to the divine within.

The film examines the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstacy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness,electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds. Within a narrative framework that imagines consciousness itself to be evolving, Entheogen documents the emergence of techno-shamanism in the post-modern world that frames the following questions: How can a renewal of ancient initiatory rites of passage alleviate our ecological crisis? What do trance dancing and festivals celebrating unbridled artistic expression speak to in our collective psyche? How do we re-invent ourselves in a disenchanted world from which God has long ago withdrawn? Entheogen invites the viewer to consider that the answers to these questions lie within the consciousness of each and every human being, and are accessible if only we give ourselves permission to awaken to the divine within.

Stan Grof, Marilyn Schlitz, Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, John Markoff, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Kat Harrison among others, postulate how the disenchantment of the modern world may be remedied by summoning the courage to take the next leap in the evolution of planetary consciousness.”

Recently I saw the movie eXistenZ by David Cronenburg. It’s about a fully-encompassing virtual reality game, where of course, something screwy happens and you begin to question what’s real and what’s not.

To play, you have to surgically install a “bio-port” at the base of the spine that the game plugs into. Conceivably, the game interacts with the brain via the nervous system via the spine. Users then “plug in” and are transported into full-scale virtual world in which they can interact with others and the environment, just like they would in the real world. Pretty neat.

Ultimately, eXistenZ suffers the same fate of so many other science fictions film; cheesy characters, bad acting, with predictable scenes all along the way.

But 45 minutes into the film it actually goes from “this is starting to suck” to “okay this is getting interesting” once they go into the game known as eXistenZ.

Anyhow, the movie got me thinking about lucid dreaming and virtual reality, and how similar the two experiences are.

There’s a scene in existenz where they’re speaking in front of a game character about the fact that they’re in a game, and guy just stands there, wobbling back in forth, in a “game loop,” not understanding what they’re saying. This cracked me up and reminds me so much of just the general weirdness that the existence of a dream character entails, and how strange it can be to tell a dream character that they are just part of your dream.

Beyond this little snippet though, the overall experience of being in an “unreal” environment that fully encompasses all the senses is what makes lucid dreaming and virtual reality so very similar. Obviously, lucid dreaming is a kind of virtual reality, and I think it rightfully fuels an interest in the development of virtual reality systems.

However, I don’t think the reverse will be true.

Virtual reality, once possible, could very likely have a negative effect on the growing culture of lucid dreaming.

Because, let’s face it – lucid dreaming is hard!

If you could simply enter into a virtual world at the touch of a button, wouldn’t you do it?

And wouldn’t it be awesome?!

Ah…but it’s just a fantasy right?

Well, I really don’t think so. If global warming or a nuclear war doesn’t ruin everything, we could develop the technology for virtual reality systems here in a few decades.

If this sounds ridiculous – and it probably does, considering, well, futurists are always wrong – go grab a snack, get comfortable, put on your thinking cap and then read this presentation by Ray Kurzweil titled The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century.

Ray Kurzweil is one of a few dozen figureheads who speak about the exponential acceleration of technology, and how this is going to result in a “Singularity.”

This term has become somewhat of fuzzy concept with lots of different meanings, but it’s safe to say it includes the point where we create an Artificial Intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. Once this AI is created, it will create increasingly more capable AI’s, who in turn do the same, and so on, creating a point at which the future simply whisps off into a singularity beyond our capacity to even imagine.

Whew!

(Yeah, that’s a lot to take in. I realize it sounds pretty absurd if you’re hearing it for the first time. If you’d like to learn more, get ready to have your mind blown so hard that it’s gonna splatter on a nearby wall and check out The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil and Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau. Radical Evolution is a more unbiased look at what’s coming and I recommend reading it first for anyone not already familiar with Kurzweil’s ideas.)

Anyhow:

What’s this got to do with lucid dreaming?

Nothing in particular, just that I think those of us who are fascinated with the idea of being in a lucid dreaming world where we can do whatever we want will likely find it fascinating that we’ll be able to replicate this concept virtually, without going to sleep, without any special skills, without supplements, and without techniques, cheaply and easily here a few decades.

Supposedly.

For me personally -

If I could enter into a virtual world at the click of a button, I bet I’d eventually spend much less time exploring the world of dreams.

What would you do?

Watching films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive is like entering into someone else’s dream.

Just like a dream, every scene carries an intangible sense of meaning to it while it is happening. Yet once it’s over there’s a disconnect to what was before and what is next; how this leads to that, how this scene connects to the one before it, and the one after.

And in this way David Lynch pieces together his films like a dream.

Dreams sequences often do not logically follow any order or consistency. Yet while they are happening, everything makes perfect sense.

No one questions the illogical consistencies of the dream while they are happening (unless this is a lucid dreamer making a conscious intent to become awake within the dream.)

Just like characters in a dream, the people in Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway don’t react when their surroundings inexplicably change, when other characters suddenly switch personalities or identities, nor even when their own sense of identity, personality, or physical body become wholly different! The story simply moves right along, just like a dream, with everyone along for the ride, and no one noticing anything out of the ordinary.

Yet there’s still an underlying, abstract thread running through the plot of films like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, tying things together just enough so they don’t fall apart.

This mirrors how bizarre elements in a dream that seemingly have no relationship actually do fit together in an abstract sense, especially (or only) in respect to the dreamers mind and life experiences.

Once I started viewing the movie as if it were a dream, pieced together scene by scene, it started to make a lot more sense.

It was the scene where Betty auditions for a movie role that led me to think of each scene as the scene of a dream, containing an inexplicable sense of meaning and emotion at the time that doesn’t add up when taken in linearly. There were also the obvious references to dreams such as the camera fading into the bed leading to a new scene and the movie ending with a character dead on the bed.

All that being said, I think David Lynch purposely puts together his films with enough loose ends, abstraction, and genuine weirdness that multiple interpretations are required to make sense of the film, none of them wholly correct or complete, including the idea that his films are made like dreams.