Battle Of The “Experts”
by Aaron Licht and Brighid Mooney

This month, we float by as Brighid and Aaron (viciously, maliciously, and mercilessly!) face off on lucid dreaming in music & film.

Aaron: … so that's why many great thinkers believe cinema can feel like the viewer’s dream. . .

Brighid: Well, obviously cinema is something that takes place on a whole other plane of reality. Something that you see but aren't physically a part of. In that way, it's very much like a dream, with the exception that it doesn't originate from inside your own head.

Aaron: It's true that cinema is external to the viewer's mind, but it does originate inside the filmmaker’s head. The director controls everything seen, and essentially remains physically excluded. A film is the director's lucid dream. He can shape the events as desired. (Especially with computer animation. Think the sky would look better purple? Done.)

Brighid: That's true. So it's like a lucid dream for the filmmaker that is transferred over to the viewer, who often has to submit to a willful suspension of disbelief, which can be an important part of lucid dreaming as well. So the whole filmmaking and then viewing process is like simultaneous lucid dreaming; a shared dream between filmmaker and viewer.

Aaron: Wow, that’s insane. Ouch. I like that filmmaking can be seen as a shared dream, but I think it's shared horizontally among the audience with the director outside pulling the strings, outside of its dreamlike effects. I mean the film is certainly like a lucid dream for the director, but the final effect is that the viewer experiences events as a dream out of his control (as "real" experience on some deep subconscious level). I'm trying to think of a film that best illustrates this concept of film as dream and this issue of control. The Nightmare on Elm Street films?

Brighid: That's a good point. So it's like a lucid dream for the director, but like a regular dream for the viewer since once it gets to them it's already outside of their control. I think this would be true of most films though. It's something that you experience emotionally and psychologically but not physically, like a dream. Although, with the way the human mind works, a memory of a dream is essentially the same as a memory of a lived physical experience and the same as a memory of a film experience. They all fade together into something indivisible, a blurred past remembrance. A film can have the same emotional impact on you as something you physically experience and as something you dream.

Aaron: Very true! That blurred remembrance gives rise to the classic joke with animated "TV dads" like Peter Griffin & Homer Simpson. They occasionally mistake a viewed TV experience as real lived experience "Remember when the Fonz came over and beat those street punks at their own game? Those sure were happy days..."

And young viewers often experience a powerful horror film, on line with an emotionally scarring bad dream. My sister saw the Exorcist at a girl’s sleepover when she was small. The next day, my parents were certain that she'd lived through some otherworldly experience. And of course that's the true horror in Nightmare on Elm Street; waking up to realize that the dream horror is a real physical threat.

Brighid: The line between dream and reality is also pretty easy to blur. I remember several times where I would be sleeping and someone still felt the need to try and talk to me. I would wake up later and have to find them to ask whether the conversation that I sort of remembered having actually took place or if it was all a dream.

And the blurred line between dream and reality is often explored really successfully in film. There's that cliché of the character waking up to find that the whole thing was a dream (or was it?), like in Mulholland Drive or in Donnie Darko, where it’s never really certain whether everything that happened was just a dream or if it all took place in a tangent reality, or some strange combination of the two.

Aaron: ...or some strange combination of the two. Have you ever awoken to the music of your radio alarm, and then drifted back into a state of 'half sleep'? I can remember quite a few instances when I wasn't awake and I wasn't exactly asleep, but the very real music filled the air and markably affected my perception of reality. I thought I was awake, but my mind was still unattached from the real world and simply drifted with the vibe of the music. I can recall many early mornings in High School, waking up at 5:30 for a grocery shift, and Danny Elfman's Oingo Boingo would put me in the strangest mood. It wouldn't wake me up, but I certainly wouldn’t fall asleep. And for the whole morning, my waking life was shifted into a different state, unsettled, but certainly more entertaining than the blunt grocery boy experience.

Brighid: Yeah, I've had that too. Where the alarm goes off and it rouses you out of a deep sleep but doesn't quite wake you. It can put you into another world, the world of whatever song is being played, where you feel like you're awake, but obviously you're not. And some music is really good at putting you into that sort of trance-like state even when you're not asleep. Music that already sort of feels like a dream, like Radiohead or Sigur Ros.

Aaron: "I'm not here, this isn't happening." “How to Disappear Completely”? Listen to Kid A over and over and over. The dreamworld experience is especially intense when combining this dream-like music with a dream-like movie, Michael Andrew's score for Donnie Darko or Air's score for the The Virgin Suicides being perfect examples. A perfect synthesis includes the trippy, ever-changing visuals of Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Have you ever seen it?

Brighid: Strangely enough, that's the song I’m listening to at this very moment. I have seen Waking Life and it's a wonderful exploration of all the stuff we've been talking about. What is real and what is a dream, or is there ultimately really any difference between them at all. It is arguable that the entire human experience only takes place within the mind anyway, and then dreaming is just as real as what we already think of as "real," our waking life.

Aaron: Indeed. In Waking Life, Wiley Wiggins only gradually begins to realize that he isn't a slave to his dream experience; that he can fully participate in his life, take control and change whatever he desires. Tell tale signs reveal the nature of his dream state. He cannot adjust the light levels, he jumps from location to location with no memory of the trip, and, yes he often seems to float high above the ground. So Brighid, now I have a question for you... what signs do we have?

Brighid: Inexplicable jumps in time? Knowing people that you don't actually know?

Aaron: That's right! Apparently I'm in Toronto and you New York. Do I question how your words appear on my screen (assuming that you do exist)? And… aren't we supposed to be battling about something? I have no recollection of what we're doing here.

Brighid: Battle? Oh . . . right. So does this mean that we are in a dream ourselves? And if we are in a dream, and we know that we're in a dream . . . that means that we're lucid and have control, right?

Aaron: …I suppose it does.

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