Inception doesn’t really count - it’s a military device for shared lucid dreaming.
Some movies do attempt to at least make their dreams aesthetically different, with blurring, a different color palette, distorted audio, etc.
I tried to think about what dreams really look like. The conclusion I came to was that the background of a dream is always what you see when you close your eyes - blackness sparkling with random phosphemes (sort of like TV static with the brightness level really really low). So that should always be the background, with whatever elements are active in the dream sort of floating in front of the void. I imagine something like the holovid of the kid in Minority Report, or the guy’s Kinect hack to show him in live 3D with the 3D and image only showing from one angle, or Photosynth which attempts to construct 3D constructs from crowdsourced flickr streams.
Of course truly depicting dreams would require drugging the audience.
This is an excellent point; however, I think that you can achieve a reasonable facsimile of a dream state by showing those sudden-to-the-viewer changes of perspective and character and scene, but having the main character act as though it were all a smooth, normal progression for him. I.e., without reacting in surprise or puzzlement.
The point of that scene was that it was not a dream; Rosemary only thought it was (at first) because her chocolate mousse – sorry, mouse – had been drugged.
Actually there is a Star Trek TNG episode in which Data starts dreaming. I don’t remember much of it except I think it had a crow flying down the hall. It had a very time/sensory distorted feel to it that I thought felt reasonably authentic at the time because it had that quiet otherworldly feel to it.
I almost wonder if the familiarity of the sets helped this part, too—the interior of the Enterprise-D has to look as recognizable to a lot of people as the hallway of their own house. Seeing that weirdly filmed and distorted has to be a lot more surreal than just some random set.
I’m with WhyNot. The hard part in putting a ‘real’ dream onscreen is that dreams always involve a lot of things you just know without being told. I don’t think there is a way to transmit that kind of unconscious knowledge. I did think Inception did a good job of simulating some aspects of dreaming, like the changes in setting and the flashing back and forward between worlds. That was my favorite part of the movie.
Perhaps too, Data’s lack of emotion plays like quiet acceptance of the unusual/extraordinary. When dreaming you calmly accept really bizarre things as if they are mundane. Yes, there is a bird flying down the hallway of the Enterprise, and too slow to be real. Yes, I can breathe underwater if I’m swimming with clothes on, as long as I don’t swim too fast. The scene was filmed not quite in slow motion, if I recall it correctly, and the sound was somehow muffled or perhaps similarly slowed.
There are aspects of the Ryan Reynolds movie The Nines that I thought had dreamlike qualities. But only when he got confused and had the moments of “Hey, wait. This just can’t be right.”
I agree with this too. There is an enormous amount of implicit knowledge in your dreams, since ultimately you’re creating it. That must be incredibly difficult to reproduce because you’d need to remove all requirements for exposition. I would think it’s easier with TV characters you know very, very well because you don’t need dialogue to explain what the person is experiencing. Like when Joyce died on Buffy. It wasn’t a dream, but the extended, nearly-no-dialogue section of that episode still conveyed volumes about what the characters were experiencing in a way that I think is key for making dream sequences work. Dreams are experienced more than narrated.
On the other hand, I sometimes have pretty “narrative” dreams. I had one this morning where I was on the LOST island and was in league with the Others but living apart from them on the castaways’ beach. Some newcomers landed and were suspicious about things like, where did my group get food? And I spun some nonsense story about how we all survived on fruit (“really? where do you get your protein?”) while plotting to lure them to Dharmaville for Ben to deal with.
I had another dream I have may have mentioned somewhere where the crew of Star Trek (TNG) landed on the LOST island, but I don’t remember much beyond that.
Whether it’s realistic or not, and if so, I want to try that drug!, but Enter The Void has the most amazing drug hallucinations I’ve ever seen. (a few seconds of it is shown in the trailer, at about 32 seconds in. In the movie the sequence goes on for about 5 minutes. It’s breathtaking!)
Koxinga is referencing a scene from the Tom Cillo movie Living In Oblivion, where Tito, Peter Dinklage’s character, rants at the director (Steve Buscemi) of the movie they’re making about dwarves in dreams. It’s very funny.
Yeah, I watched his link to the youtube video before I posted. Funny and makes a valid point, but if one were to take its argument too seriously I will defend Lynch. His dream sequences have lot more going on in them than dwarves.
That was exactly my gripe with Inception - the dream sequences were far too linear and logical for them to seem like dreams. Most of my dreams have random things popping in and out for no apparent reason. Like once, I dreamed I was standing in my room, and I looked down, and the floor was covered in guinea pigs. That sort of thing.
Actually, while tossing and turning last night, I remembered, What Dreams May Come in which the afterlife of heaven and hell is essentially a dreamlike place. It was also narrative heavy, but what made it work was the “dream logic”. Chris sees a beautiful landscape that looks like one of his wife’s paintings. So it becomes a painting as he’s running through it, get bright oil paints on his shoes. He recognizes his children (pre-deceased) even though they’ve adopted all-new physical appearances. He doesn’t need to be told that his young daughter is now an adult Asian woman, he simply KNOWS.
The Adventures of Baron von Munchuasen uses the same anything-goes logic. They are climbing down a rope that is tied to the bottom point of the half-moon in the sky. As they climb own, and down, they realize the rope isn’t long enough. No problem, we’ll just unhook it from the moon, and let that other end hang down and continue on… I works only until someone consciously realizes “wait this can’t be right”… with Wile E. Coyote results. (Note: I saw this a LONG time ago and may be misremembering the moon-rope scene, but that’s how I remember it.)
