By “realistic,” I mean, “like a real dream.” I’ve never seen that done. I just watched Inception, which is mostly dream sequences, and it brought that home. All dream sequences I’ve ever seen filmed, however bizarre, are unrealistic in that they are too realistic, i.e., too much like real waking life. Things don’t “just happen,” the narrative thread is continuous, effect follows cause, two and two make four, the environment stays more or less the same from one moment to the next (or, when it does not, the change is remarkable and has some actual plot-related significance), and the known laws of physics are, at least, the default setting. Dreams, at least in my experience, are nothing like that. Dreams are rooted in reality in the sense that they are drawn from your memories, and a person who has never seen or heard of an elephant will never dream of one; but the memories seem to be all thrown in sack and grabbed at random and mixed together at random. You might be having a conversation with your mother, who in the next moment is George Washington, and you do not notice, you assume you were really talking all along to Washington, who is now Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or, rather, three of them, which would not be so bad if it ever rained any more, Hildegard!, and so on, and even this description paints too coherent a picture. True, while dreaming you always seem to assume that you are experiencing real waking life – but not because it resembles waking life; only because the faculties by which you might tell the difference are suspended. Could a dream-sequence anything like a real dream actually be done? Or is it beyond any writer’s or director’s creative power?
Whether it would be worth doing is another question. People go to a movie to see a story. A dream is not a story, and if you want what it is, you might as well stay home and take a nap.
As dreams are not experienced by human senses, I don’t think human senses can reproduce them. What makes them dreamlike is the observer, not the observed - so showing something on a screen cannot replicate a dream so long as the viewer is awake and sane.
But, dreams do take the form of human sense-impressions subjectively indistinguishable from real ones. Sight and hearing, at any rate, and touch to some extent; I cannot recall ever dreaming a smell, nor experiencing any physical pain that did not turn out, on waking, to be a real one.
I agree with the OP – my main disappointment with Inception was that the industrialist’s “dreams” were seemingly directed not by the subconscious but by Michael Bay. (And I realize that these were stage-directed and not real dreams, but still, I was kind of hoping that everyone would be in their underwear in someone’s second-grade classroom at one point.) It reminded me of Adaptation, where the “dumb” screenwriter brother takes over the plot for the climax to turn in into a “normal” movie.
I think David Lynch’s Inland Empire might be a good example of a really dreamlike movie, with the caveat that it’s more of a nightmare and that there’s no sharp dividing line between dream and waking reality in the movie – ie, the protagonist does not go to sleep at some point, the whole thing has a dreamlike quality. Also, I recall it being dwarfless.
Movies also don’t being on drugs very well. Probably because like dreams, so much of it’s uncanniness is emotional, and the visual aspects of the experience have kind of been worn into cliche.
I don’t think so. And I think what can’t be portrayed isn’t the bizarre stuff, but, as you say in the OP, the “normal” feeling of the bizarre stuff.
Last night, I had a dream that involved a part where I was in bed with Alton Brown. We were talking, not having sex (and how big a NERD am I to have a TALKING IN BED dream about a celebrity I find really sexy?!), and two of my classmates were in this huge bed with us and somehow we got ourselves turned around so that he and I were at the head of the bed and the other two at the foot, like the Grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then suddenly my real life SO was there and I was snuggling with him and still talking to AB.
But that “suddenly” wasn’t in the dream. It wasn’t at all jarring to me that a body simply appeared out of nowhere, under my chin. It went with the flow quite nicely. But describe it in words, or put it on screen, and there’s a moment of disconnect, a jarringness, a “WOAH, where did HE come from?” Yet that isn’t the way the experience went at all. That would be, in fact, antithetical to the wonderfully relaxed dream it was.
It’s the smoothness that’s missing from dreams on screen, more than anything else. Our mind in a dream state rolls with the flow and doesn’t question when people appear or disappear or turn into different people or the setting changes or anything else. But our waking minds, the ones watching a film, are always going to notice and question that sort of thing.
Quite familiar with Lynch, and I was thinking of the dwarf in Twin Peaks when I wrote the OP. But even Eraserhead – even the dream sequences inEraserhead – bears too little resemblance to a dream. Mainly for the reasons WhyNot gave.
There could be some ground yet to explore there, though it is no easy creative challenge. Filmmakers at least since the German Expressionists have understood that you can use nothing but visual images to subtly, even subconsciously play on the viewer’s emotional state; and the invention of the soundtrack adds music, which is about that. No moviegoer will ever be induced to have a subjective experience really similar to dropping acid, but he might get further inside the head of a tripping character than has ever been done before – and not by being shown images similar to what a tripper sees; it would have to be approached kind of sideways.
Still more could be done through popcorn additives, but thanks to certain meddlesome Philistines . . . :mad:
Synecdoche, New York is as close to dream logic as I’ve ever seen in a movie, much more so than any of the movies listed so far. It has dream’s logic of emotionally significance taking precedence over physical possibility. People are reading books by authors who then appear next to them in an airplane, tatoos come to life, people move into a house which is perpetually on fire, etc. etc. The bulk of the movie takes place in a series of giant nested warehouses as the world outside lapses into a vague unexplained chaos.
Warning: I loved this flick, but most people hated it. It has Phillip S Hoffman at his most schlubiest.