Movies about Shared dream
Let’s face it, dreams can be pretty weird! While our physical body takes a well-earned rest, our brain continues to whirr away, transporting us to weird and wonderful worlds which can sometimes be enjoyable, frightening, or just downright strange.
Dreams are certainly a perplexing phenomenon, which makes them ripe for use in cinema.
Many films have used dreams in a number of interesting ways, whether it be to show the character’s innermost thoughts and desires or their worst nightmares!
Here are ten of our favourites.
Čaroděj ze země Oz (1939)
One of the earliest popular films about dreams is one of the most loved pieces of cinema of all time, The Wizard of Oz.
While in the original children’s novel of the story, the fantastical land of Oz is presented as a real (albeit faraway) place, in the film, the Dorothy and Toto’s adventures are actually all presented as one long dream sequence, and the characters Dorothy meets, such as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion are all actually versions of people from her real life!
Alenka v říši divů (1951)
Much like The Wizard of Oz, this Disney classic takes place almost entirely during a dream sequence, as Alice drifts away into a colourful dream where she meets all manner of weird and wonderful characters such as the Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit.
It’s an extremely vivid and at times strange movie, but that’s exactly what dreams are like sometimes!
Noční můra v Elm Street (1984)
This where things start to get a little darker as films strayed away from the colourful safety of dreams and into the darkness of nightmares!
And as far as nightmares go, this is a pretty scary one, giving birth to one of the most terrifying movie characters of all time in Freddy Krueger.
Věda o spánku (2004)
Yes, it’s partly in French (and Spanish) and yes, it’s a little weird (but which films about dreams aren’t?), but The Science of Sleep is a must for any sleep nerds!
It explores everything from sleepwalking to REM sleep and lucid dreaming to sleep talking as it follows the story of eccentric Frenchman Stephane Miroux, whose dreams interfere with his ability to communicate in the real world.
Matice (1999)
In the Wachowski’s cyberpunk sci-fi movie, all of humanity live their lives in one shared dream, while in the ‘real’ world, intelligent machines have taken over and brought society as we know it to its knees.
Computer hacker Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) learns that whole life has been a lie and joins the rebellion against the machines along with others who have been freed from their dream-like existence.
Waking Life (2001)
This movie, known for its unique visual style where real life action was overlaid with animation, follows the life of a young man who is in a persistent state of lucid dreaming.
It explores some pretty deep stuff such as reality, free will and of course, the meaning of life.
The unique animation style only adds to the trippy dream-like nature of the film and makes this film a truly unique work!
Vanilkové nebe (2001)
In Vanilla Sky, everything seems to be perfect for David Aames (Tom Cruise). He’s a wealthy and charismatic young man living his life in New York City, but he can’t shake the feeling that something is missing.
Without giving too much away, things begin to change when he meets Sofia (Penélope Cruz) and things start to leave the real world and enter that of dreams.
Věčný svit neposkvrněné mysli (2004)
This movie explores ideas of consciousness and memories through the eyes of a couple (played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) who have erased each other from their memories.
Carrey then goes on to regret the decision and enters into a dream-like state where their old and new memories collide as he tries to leave clues to get his ex to remember him.
Počátek (2010)
Possibly the most well-known film about dreams is Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which blends elements of psychological thriller, mystery and heist movie.
In the film, main character Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) infiltrates people’s dreams to steal information, and things get pretty complicated as Cobb and his team enter level upon level of dreams within dreams to implant thoughts inside the subconscious of another.
It’s a film that will certainly leave you with plenty to mull over in your mind regarding the ending, and what it all means!
Shutter Island (2010)
Looks like 2010 wasn’t a great year for Leo and his dreams! While dreams aren’t necessarily as central to the plot as in Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is plagued by lucid dreams which are presented in some pretty powerful and disturbing scenes.
As with a lot of the films on the list, we can’t reveal too much plot-wise but you should definitely check it out for yourself!
As you can see, films about dreams can get pretty ‘out there’ and pretty abstract, but that’s all in the nature of dreams themselves!
So if you want a movie that’s going to get the old grey matter ticking and make you think about some pretty deep concepts, you could do worse than these films!
Nicolas Cage’s Trippy New Sci-Fi Movie Uncovers a Weird Field of Dream Science
Scénář snů is just a dream, but there’s real psychology at its core.
Listopadu 12, 2023
Lais Borges/Inverse; A24 Studios; Getty
Dreaming about people we know personally can be harrowing. While they may show up looking like the friend or parent we’re familiar with, they may carry an aura of someone completely different, representing two entities at once. And if you found out someone else independently dreamed of that same person on the very same night? Spooky.
In indie film company A24’s new movie Scénář snů, that concept is taken to the extreme when people far and wide begin seeing the same man in their dreams. The man, a schlubby evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews (portrayed by Nicolas Cage), must contend with becoming a shut-eye icon when his students, colleagues, family, and strangers start seeing him wander through their dreamscapes.
As Matthews tells his young daughter, while trying to make sense of this madness, dreams are “hallucinations” that the brain makes while asleep as part of its “housekeeping.” This description is consistent with what scientists tell us about dreams, that it’s the brain’s way of processing wayward thoughts and images. What they — and Matthews — don’t fully understand is the phenomenon of shared dreams.
Shared dreams haven’t been observed or studied at Scénář snů’s imagined scale before. But, the phenomenon — defined as dreams that at least two people have with similar contents — is of great interest to psychologists. The research available demonstrates what conditions may facilitate these mutual flights of fancy.
Snít malý sen o mě
By definition, dreams are “mental content that occurs during sleep,” says Patrick McNamara, a neurology professor at Boston University. Shared dreams, he says, typically crop up between people who have some sort of relationship. “That person is emotionally important to the dreamer.” He adds that the dreamer might have a genetic or emotional attachment to this person.
Deirdre Barrett, a lecturer on psychology at Harvard University and author of Výbor spánku, vypráví Obrácený that one hypothesis behind dream function makes it more likely that shared dreams will occur on a personal level. The continuity hypothesis posits that dreams simply follow similar lines of thought as during waking hours. In other words, our dreams are just continuations of our thoughts from the day, so of course, we’re prone to dream about the people we see or think about every day.
As such, it’s reasonable that shared dreams might crop up between people who see each other every day, like couples. In a 2017 article called Mutual Dreaming, publikované ve sborníku 2019 Dreams: Understanding Biology, Psychology, and Culture [volume 1], McNamara and his co-authors review previous studies of shared dreams. The article points to a 1994 study of one couple who had 153 recorded dreams over 10 weeks, 13 of which were shared. That number may not seem immediately impressive, but the degree to which the shared dreams overlapped was surprising.
In these 13 shared dreams, on average, a whopping 39 percent of the content overlapped, while unshared dreams only matched 5 percent. This figure indicates that “such overlap cannot be a result of chance due to the low frequency at which such items occurred.” In other words, it’s no mere coincidence that these mutual dreams jumped so much in shared content. The authors of the 1994 article also “advocate that a benefit of mutual dreaming is to help strengthen emotional ties between people that desire to develop a relationship.” With this in mind, it’s plausible that Scénář snů’s protagonist would appear in his daughter’s dreams; it might even improve his relationship with them. But in the whole world’s dreams? Far less likely.
What does dreaming of someone tell us about ourselves?
Making a shared dream
The lore of shared dreams extends far beyond Nicolas Cage. Noční můra v Elm Street explores the horrors of mutual dreaming (and also nightmares coming to life), and McNamara notes that many cultures and religions ascribe prophetic powers to dreams. Knowing that shared dreams can simply come from what you choose to think about during the day means it may be possible to create them.
Barrett says that folks interested in dreams, like members of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, might sometimes try to “meet up” in dreams. They’ll agree on a location for everyone to envision, and as they sleep individually, they’ll concentrate on visualizing this place with all their friends. Barrett explains that this is less of a literal hang session in dreamland and more of an exercise for dream enthusiasts to practice to hone their skills. Some of this theory shows up in the film as a darkly funny Gen Z “dreamfluencer” company, which preaches dream-sharing practices and uses it as a way to advertise.
Dreams, shared or not, probably tell you more about your own mind than the world around you. If dreams are simply a reflection or expression of your thoughts and feelings, it’s another window into how you experience the world.
Still, if you dream of Nicolas Cage tonight, don’t be shocked.
Film Independent Presents… Nine(ish) Movies About Weird Dreams and Sleepless Nights
Along with our new virtual screening room, Nezávislý na filmu Dárky continues to recommend great stuff to watch, with weekly streaming video playlists curated by Film Independent Senior Programmer Jenn Wilson.
The subject of this week’s Film Independent Presents playlist is “dreams and insomnia.” And we have a guest co-blogger to help: writer, filmmaker and former Executive Director of the Northwest Film Forum, Courtney Sheehanová. In fact, Sheehan’s current project, Anybody’s Dream—a new series on dream technology—inspired this week’s theme. Sheehan has written the section on “Dreams,” while I wrote about “Insomnia.” So pour another cup of coffee and enjoy!
SENY
Remember any dreams lately? These days, you’re probably remembering more dreams than you usually do. And chances are those dreams are even more unusual than… well, obvyklý. You’re not alone. Over the course of just a week, the Google query, “why have my dreams been so weird lately” quadrupled in the U.S. The culprit? COVID-19. The coronavirus has forced us inside in more ways than one, as we spend less time out in the world with each other, and more time inside our minds.
Over the last several weeks, tons of articles have detailed the pandemic’s nocturnal impacts: disrupted sleep cycles, prolonged dream-saturated REM states, and dream content riddled with the hyper-specific anxieties of our times. COVID-19 dream collection projects abound, amassing dream reports for historical documentation of the collective unconscious. Even the literal horečný sen of coronavirus-infected Chris Cuomo made headline news during his brother’s press conference.
Here, Cuomo marvels at how his dreams feel “straight out of a movie.” We often compare the vivid stories, emotions and visuals of dreams to cinema. When, in fact, movies are straight out of sny. The dreaming mind is the original source of jump cuts and match dissolves. To illustrate, here’s a selection of films that fully embrace the blurry line between wake and sleep, dream and cinema:
IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962)
The very first scene of titan auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature is a sublime dream scene that sets up the film’s entire structure, each act unfolding around a dream of the titular young protagonist. It’s no small feat to cinematically render the physics-defying, constantly fluctuating movement of characters, objects and locations as we experience them in dreams. Tarkovsky does so masterfully here. In one sen scéna early in the film, Ivan falls asleep on a cot in the army barracks, which then seamlessly transforms into the bottom of a well—an evocative symbol of the unconscious.
“It’s deep,” the boy remarks as he drops feather down the deep well. “Of course it is,” his mother replies. Ivan reaches over the well to grasp at starlight he sees in the water, and in the next shot he’s down in the bottom of the well, capturing that phenomenon in dreams where the setting can change from one second to the next.
The final flashback ties all the dream symbols together, reflecting the way in which the dreaming mind recomposites fragments of memories from across our lifetime into novel convalescences. The documentary Režie: Andrej Tarkovskij (available on Kanopy) includes a fascinating section on Tarkovsky’s relationship to his dream life, with diary entries read aloud by his late wife.
WAKING LIFE (2001)
If you’re itching to transcend the confines of our current moment with a big picture zoom-out on the meaning of life and the nature of reality, now is a great time to revisit Richard Linklater’s loquacious rotoscoped amble through a series of increasingly intense lucid dreams (dreams in which you know you are dreaming.) It’s been almost 20 years since this technically innovative and unapologetically intellectual “experimental philosophical adult animated docufiction” premiered at Sundance in 2001. Though it skews too heavily toward white male pontification, there are many flavors of insight on offer here—and some of the most iconic cinematic representations of lucid dreaming.
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1992)
WIRED just revisited Wim Wenders’ sprawling 1992 film, set in the near-future of 1999 when a nuclear satellite gone haywire leads to a global unraveling nearly as epic as the directors cut’s five-hour runtime. The article draws parallels to the current pandemic and life under quarantine, noting how “the film mutates from spirited intercontinental caper to one that mulls the impact of isolation, fear and uncertainty in the face of a spreading, unseen menace.” The future imagined by the film accurately anticipated many technological developments, including videophones, talking GPS systems and—most provocative of all—a dream-recording device.
Even this idea isn’t so far-fetched: Japanese researchers established the basic proof of concept for dream decoding using neuroimaging back in 2013. Before you lose (more) sleep over the idea of someone watching your dreams, rest assured. We’re a long way off from a fully capable dream recorder. But other examples of dream tech are emerging, from EEG wearables that claim to induce lucid dreams to an MIT prototype that allows you to program what you want to think about in hypnagogia, the liminal state when you’re falling asleep (just Google “MIT Dormio” for a mind-bending rabbit hole.)
ON BODY AND SOUL (2017)
If the idea of shared dreaming intrigues you, this is a must watch. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear at Berlinale—and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, in 2017—for her film Na těle a duši. In the film, an unlikely romance unfolds at a cattle slaughterhouse between the CFO and a quality inspector after the pair discovers a bizarre link: they are having the same shared dream each night. With dark mood and dark humor in equally effective measure, Na těle a duši renders the intertwining of two peoples’ psychological interiors in a distinctly memorable way, thanks to a clever visual device.
RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS EPISODES 5 & 6 (2018)
Pardon a detour into television—but ever so slight, really, because Terence Nance’s Náhodné akty létání is a show unlike any other. The final two episodes of the first season take on sleep and dreams in a profoundly unique way. Episode 5, “I Tried to Tell My Therapist About My Dreams/MARTIN HAD A DREEEEAAAAM” offers a speculative telling of what Martin Luther King, Jr. quite literally dreamed—as well as what happened after he woke up.
In the next episode, the season finale, “A Woman Stays Woke Too Long,” ask the question: at what point is peaceful sleep a privilege, a luxury? Who gets to rest easy, and who has to always be on their guard? In the central story, a woman deliberates whether to use a service that uploads your consciousness to the cloud, a process that pulls the user into a kind of catatonic sleep state. Such ethically fraught neurotechnology feels just near future enough to be frighteningly believable—especially as the demand for touchless tech and virtual interactions only continue to grow in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
More excellent dream-invocations in cinema: Paprika, Kurosawa’s Dreams, Cell, Věčný svit neposkvrněné mysli, Hřbitov nádhery, Portrét dámy, Slyšel jsem zpívat mořské panny, Movern Callar.
INSOMNIA (1997)
In times of uncertainty, people deal with their stress in different ways. Some, like me, sleep for long stretches and squeeze in as many catnaps as my schedule will allow. But others find sleep completely elusive. Sleeplessness can cause us to lose our grip on reality, and the four films I’ve chosen here demonstrate what life is like when humans can’t sleep and life becomes a waking dream/nightmare, starting with, you guessed it…
Původní norský Nespavost, from 1997. The film features a stellar performance by Stellan Skarsgård as a cocky Swedish police detective working a murder case in Norway. When a shootout results in the accidental death of his cop partner, the combination of guilt/grief—coupled with the six months of daylight of Norway’s midnight sun—results in a bout of sleeplessness that has Skarsgård imagining that he’s speaking to his dead partner every night while struggling to sleep. Skarsgård’s detective is an unabashedly corrupt coward who isn’t going to face any consequences for anything he does in the end, but dealing with his own psyche looks like it might be punishment enough for him.
THE MACHINIST (2004)
In what may be one of the most shocking physical transformations undertaken by an actor for a role, Christian Bale lost 70 pounds to play the lead character, Trevor Reznik, in Strojník. I hadn’t seen this film since it came out in 2004, and it’s still a completely mesmerizing and wonderfully bizarre noir tale. Trevor hasn’t been able to sleep for an entire year and is literally wasting away before our eyes. Suddenly, strange things start happening to him. But are they happening for real, or is he hallucinating because of sleep deprivation? I won’t reveal the answers here in case people haven’t yet seen the film, but suffice it to say the mind is a strange and powerful thing, especially when it hides our secrets from everybody—including ourselves.
TAXI DRIVER (1976), FIGHT CLUB (1999)
The ultimate pillars of toxic masculinity, Taxíkář a Fight Club, remain completely fascinating chilling examples of what happens when writers genuinely grapple with their own psyches in a dark night of the soul. Sometimes it’s literally as if both Paul Schrader and Chuck Palahniuk asked themselves the same question, “just what is wrong with white American males?” and what popped out was these two films. Both films are about middle-class White American male insomniacs casting about for some meaning in life.
But as it turns out, both films’ characters end up being particularly dangerous. When they don’t get what they want from the women in their lives, they each form insane ideologies that end in real violence. To add insult to injury, both get away with it, proving that in the end that they always possessed what so many in society don’t have: the benefit of the doubt and plausible deniability.
Here’s where to find this week’s featured titles:
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