Most dream sequences that I see in movies or TV programs have what seems to me to be a basic and therefore fatal flaw (fatal in that it immediately takes me out of the suspension of disbelief). They show the dreamer in the 3rd person, as if the dreamer could see himself from outside.
I don’t have that ability in real life and I don’t spend very much time in front of mirrors, so I never see myself in dreams that way.
One sequence that gets it mostly right is from Hitchcock’s Spellbound. In the early part where the protagonist is dealing cards, all we see in the visual re-creation is the dreamer’s hands and a deck of cards. Later in the dream the protagonist is seen briefly running away from something, which kind of spoils it. But it helps to illustrate what I’m talking about. Here is a link to this scene - the actual dream starts at about 0:28. And here is someone’s idea of cinema’s top 10 dream sequences, and every one of them has the dreamer in 3rd person.
Anyway, does this bother anyone else? Or do other people dream of themselves in the 3rd person like most dream sequences? Or am I being too nitpicky over this issue?
I’d be less concerned about that than things like places suddenly shifting, people turning into other people, magically “knowing” things to be true which make no sense, etc.
There’s a myriad of ways in which dreams are portrayed incorrectly. Yours would be the cheapest to correct for, but that would assume that there’s any desire to present a dream sequence as a genuine dream sequence. Outside of David Lynch, dream sequences are intended purely to throw in “gotcha ya” scenes to amuse the audience. The viewer isn’t expected to interpret them in any other way than that.
They usually seem wrong to me because they try to pull us in and make us think what is happening in the dream is actually happening. It’s rare that someone wakes up from a dream and I think it was an effective
I don’t find anything wrong with them, other than the fact that they’re boring and a crutch for the writer to illustrated the dreamer’s concerned, which could be done in other ways. I’ve never seen the need for anything other than a single sentence.
But I can’t imagine it would ruin the story for me, especially over the trivial issues you bring up.
But we never see ourselves in the third person in waking life, either. Why isn’t this just as valid a criticism of non-dream sequences? If the camera is magical enough to follow the hero through the “real world”, then it can be magical enough to follow the hero into Sandman-land, too.
Dreaming of myself in the third person is the default for me. Most of my dreams work like an actor watching a movie in which they played one of the characters. I am usually conscious of a character being “me” even if the character doesn’t look like me.
Sometimes what I think of as “me” changes during the dream from one character to another. Like I might be dreaming that I’m Sherlock Holmes, but halfway through the dream I am now Watson.
(This happens with other people too. So when I’m Sherlock, I might think that Watson is being played by my brother. My brother could also be a girl or a dog or an alien. My dreams have a great costume department.)
The closest dream to the one described by the OP is really weird. I sometimes have dreams in which “I” (what I think of as me in the dream) am a camera following me (what you’d call the real me) around. Since it’s all camera-eye view, I never see the camera except in mirrors or the like… in which case “me the camera” is a floating metal sphere with a lens in the center and an antenna on the right side. Usually “me the camera” is getting stage directions from a hidden director - so he’ll tell me to zoom in or pan across, etc.
OK, gotta go now before you all send the guys in white coats after me.
I have found that, in dreaming, the point-of-view – the “camera” – is usually just behind and just above…and very slightly to the right…of my head. A little as if a camera were strapped to my right shoulder-blade and peering over my shoulder.
When I’m “out of myself” in waking life – say, I’m on a long hike, or I’m totally absorbed in a movie, or I’m a passenger in a car on a long drive – this also sometimes happens. My “viewpoint” moves out of my actual head and hovers a little behind me.
(I hold this to be a hallucination, and not any kind of mystic astral travel woo.)
In my opinion, the best dream sequences in movies, TV, and books are those where the scene and setting drift from one place to another. Alice through the Looking Glass does this brilliantly, where she’s in a shop, then in a rowboat, then talking to Humpty Dumpty, all in seamless transitions.
G.K. Chesterton achieves this brilliantly in The Man Who Was Thursday. (Like to Project Gutenberg for free download.) I re-read this book every few years, because the memory of it, like a real dream, always slips away. Each reading feels new, and yet has a deja vu touch of familiarity.
The criticisms of the OP seem odd. Why do you want dreams to be in first person when the rest of the movie is not? Wouldn’t that be a tip off? Aren’t first person sequences in movies usually a gimmick? Especially when people do dream in third person. I know I have on occasion.
The only criticism I can think of that would apply to most dream sequences is they’re usually straightforwardly symbolic in a Freudian way that most real dreams aren’t. But that’s a narrative convention and with that attitude everything in a movie is a contrivance. So it’s nothing to get worked up about. Often times you go to sleep and wake up and you’ve figured out a problem or come up with an idea, so showing this process in a dramatic way makes sense to me.
I don’t know about you guys but after a bad dream I’ve never bolted up or yelled. I just wake up. At most my body might jerk a little, like if I was falling off a cliff and woke up right before hitting the ground.
Because the movie is a story told in 3rd person point of view (usually). A dream sequence in such a movie is supposed to be real to the character in which case, based on my own personal dream experience, it should be in 1st person point of view.
However, I see that other people do sometimes dream in 3rd person. This makes me curious, for example, Dracoi, what do you look like in your dreams? Is it a straightforward representation of yourself similar to what you see in the mirror? Whenever I catch sight of a reflection of myself accidentally, such as when passing a shop window on the street, it is always jarring to me. How does your dream self react to this 3rd person view?
But the waking portion of a movie is also supposed to be real to the character. And changing viewpoint for dream sequences would make them less real, not more, by giving us a tip-off that it’s a dream.
I almost never remember my dreams, but my wife claims that she always dreams in the third person, and looks at herself as if from outside. As far as “what she looks like in her dreams,” she also tells me that none of the characters in her dreams (including herself) have visible faces, but somehow she knows who they are.
Check out Synecdoche, New York. The whole movie is a dream sequence (In my interpretation, anyway) and is as close as any movie has ever come to re-creating the experience of actually dreaming.
Often, my dreams are from the indentity of other people. Usually male, but once or twice I’ve been female. It’s usually some complicated dramatic tangle, of which I’m only aware of some small fraction; there’s a sense of a “bigger world” that I’m in. I dream a lot of crowd scenes, like crowded ballrooms or crowded theater lobbies or crowded ice-skating rinks. There is usually an enhanced awareness of architecture: I dream wonderful motifs of arches, domes, colonnades, cupolas, verandas, and grand staircases.
Only once, EVER, have I looked into a mirror in a dream. It wasn’t my face that I saw! It was the face of the character I was dreaming of being, but it wasn’t me! Really damn weird experience!
Dreams are hard to do because while you’re in the dream, you typically don’t realize things are amiss. It’s like the critical thinking part of your brain is taking a break so you just kind of accept that everything is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s only after you wake up (or become lucid) that you realize all the logical disconnects. Dreams aren’t just imagining a series of events, it’s a completely different state of mind. If you depict a dream with dream logic, it’s immediately obvious it’s a dream. On the other hand if you depict it like it’s a convincing reality then it feels completely inauthentic.
I still think the best dream sequence is from the Buffy the Vampire episode “Restless”. It does a great job of capturing that hazy logic feeling. Things don’t make sense, but they sort of feel like they should.
I am talking about the phenomenon of “point of view.” The common way to tell a story in a movie is to show it from the point of view of some (nearly omniscient) third party who is not one of the characters. On the other hand, a dream sequence is, almost by definition, in the point of view of one person, the dreamer.
You seem to be under the impression that we should never know when a scene is a dream, so that the writer/director can surprise us. While that is a well-known (and done to death) cliché, there are lots of movies where surprise that it is a dream is not necessary. Let’s pretend that I’m only talking about those cases.
The OP reminds me of people insisting until their faces turn blue that you can’t read in dreams.
Aside from the fact that it’s insisting that dreams conform to real life, but it’s still insisting that dreams conform to rules that they provably don’t.
There’s a difference between how a film is shot and whether the narrative is first person or third person or whatever. You can shoot a first person narrative, where the audience is given no additional knowledge than the protagonist, in third person. A dream sequence is basically that.
I have dreams in both first person and third person, sometimes within the same dream. I also am sometimes me, or sometimes somebody else. And I also have dreams where I’m not involved at all, and am just observing other people.
For me there’s no default dream POV, so therefore no way for me to judge that in dream sequences. Most of them don’t feel like the dreams I experience, but I have seen a few that come close, though none that I can bring to mind right now, unfortunately.