dream scenes/sequences in film and tv

[L2R]

the good dream scene in episode 8 of season 2 of boardwalk empire has triggered this thread i've been considering making for a while. dreams are one thing film makers mess up more often than not. it's so annoying and cheap to have a plot point revolve around some inexplicable insight given by a dream.

with the compressed sense of time, it is hard for film to portray dreams accurately. in real life, they seldom provide us with answers, mainly just vague memories and confused interpretations. if film were to do this properly, any film with dream aspects might end up spending too much time on it. sure, this might be fine for a david lynch movie, but it hardly gives you a sellable three part plot path.

this thread is to discuss dreams in films and tv, and for posters to list the good (condensation, displacement and symbolism), the bad (straight narratives, same characters) and the ugly (there is nothing cheaper than prophetic narrative dreams).

 

[lostNfound]

Waking Life comes to mind....

As well as ......

 

[L2R]

you reckon these are good or bad, aye losty?

 

[lostNfound]

fast times at ridgemont high has nostalgic value I suppose. Waking Life was too general.

Thinking about it though, a brilliant dream scene is from Waltz with Bashir.

 

[Max Power]

Homer in Chocolate Land. Wonderful animation by David Silverman.

 

[One Thousand Words]

If we are using the Simpsons then this is kind of a dream. Even in Spanish
[video=youtube_share;Aa5lTnuS9Rk]http://youtu.be/Aa5lTnuS9Rk[/video]

Twin peaks would be one of my favourites
[video=youtube_share;guwl1w0yFGk]http://youtu.be/guwl1w0yFGk[/video]

 

[alasdairm]

a classic dream sequence from an outstanding movie:



alasdair

 

[psood0nym]

Homer in Chocolate Land. Wonderful animation by David Silverman.

This sort of imagery is the kind most often seen in popular depictions of dreams. It's very much an artistic depiction of dreams as an aggregate of associations around a theme. It expresses some qualities of dreams without actually looking like them, or at least not any dream I've ever had.

Another example of this sort can be seen in the video game, Kirby's Dream Land. Kirby puffs up and morphs into different shapes as he travels across cloudy vistas, and his enemies pop into colorful explosions of stars that resemble pillows. I've never had a dream that remotely resembled that, but the fact that it's "dreamy" is unmistakable because it underscores unreality, ephemerality, and insubstantiality. In a similar vein, "Little Nemo -- Adventures in Dream Land," depicts Nemo soaring through the clouds in a flying bed, recalling our associations with dreamers as having their heads "in the clouds" while artistically depicting all dreams as flights of unbridled imagination to other worlds in bed rather than any single dream.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception both have sequences that contain more realistic dream themes and imagery, though the depiction of dreams in these films is often tied into larger themes like imagination and memory, which gives them a logic much more coherent than experienced in most dreams.

Despite the fact that the plot of Jan Svankmajer's "Down to the Cellar" is seemingly unified from start to finish in time and place, unlike most dreams, the little girl's wordless decent into a shadowy labyrinth of surreal scenes, repeating imagery, and strange substitutions of objects (like rocks for food) makes it, for me, the one film I know of that best recalls the dream state.

 

[23536]

67% of Mulholland Dr.

Not possible to do it any better.

 

[psood0nym]

^I think Inland Empire was even more dream-like than Mulhulland Drive, if you haven't seen it. Lynch introduced it with a quote about dreams from an Upanishad:

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

The following quote from Zoran Samardzija alludes to Inland Empire's associational plot structure, a writing technique I believe is meant to recall the way dreams are often structured by aggregates of associated memories.

The structure of Inland Empire differs from prior Lynch films, Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. It is neither a Möbius strip that endlessly circles around itself, nor is it divisible into sections of fantasy and reality. Its structure is more akin to a web where individual moments hyperlink to each other and other Lynch films -- hence the musical number that closes the film which contains obvious allusions to everything from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks.

I also search out my own gonzo review of Inland Empire here on Bluelight and, sure enough, lots about dreams:

David Lynch’s film “Inland Empire” finally came to my city, and I met it there with 12mg of 4-AcO-DMT loaded in a syringe...

Lynch’s film is a monster lurking in the shadows of a Narnian wardrobe, a world of overlapping fabrics, strange connections made in the dark, and holes in silk, burned through with cigarettes. A world I have always wanted to swim in since I was a child reveling in the terror-charged wonder of nightmares.

“Inland Empire” is a kind of Dadaist meta-film and to say the 4-AcO-DMT added a few layers to the beautiful, self-referential absurdity would be an immense understatement. The theater became an extension of the film, with the creaks of the seats of patrons, unaware and uneasy, becoming the strain of the building itself trying to contain this wild thing from gnashing its way out of the screen. Intermittently the entrance doors would open, allowing phantasmagoric shimmers of light into the darkness as unknown figures quietly shuffled in and out. And my mind was just one more screen, one scattered across these many worlds, letting in dark figures and shimmering light from the cracks at the periphery of my vision. In the film the characters become detached in time. Likewise my mind seemed temporally extended, aware of my how my past was influencing my perceptions and how these haunting images would become slotted for reappearance in the future of my dreams.

The experience and the film were in turn, profound, grotesque, beautiful, hilarious, discordant, and disturbing. Strangely, the disconnected, dream-like images were responsible for the film’s greatest sense of realism. There was something of truth in tumbling through the wardrobe, awash in the plurality of its textures and its shifting threads, something about the depth of an image and the illimitable moment. They are like a puzzle whose completed picture is that of yet another puzzle whose pieces are skillfully hewn together in conflict with their forms, yet the exquisitely fragmentary image produced is a fuller representation of its subject’s reality than the one demanded by objective coherence.

 

[MrGrunge]

I love the dream sequence in Kagemusha - the color palette is so striking:

 

[coors light]

The dream sequence in the fly is pretty messed up when you see it for the first time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZUpj9_Mwp4

 

[L2R]

This sort of imagery is the kind most often seen in popular depictions of dreams. It's very much an artistic depiction of dreams as an aggregate of associations around a theme. It expresses some qualities of dreams without actually looking like them, or at least not any dream I've ever had.

this is mainly what i was getting at with this thread. 99% of film dreams are in no way like actual dreams. psychedelic pictures and sounds are a fun way to break up the standard story progression, and in many examples in this thread, the films are of benefit for them. But they aren't really dreams, they're more like inexplicable acid trips for the characters.

keep them coming!