by Colin Mcginn
But it is equally true that in dreams objects often take on a charged existence. I recently had separate dreams in which a book and a shoe appeared carrying immense significance—the book as a repository of genius (Nabokov's Lolita, in the dream I mentioned earlier) and the shoe as a remnant of an absent friend. In both cases the objects were presented in astonishing detail, with a preternatural clarity, and they seemed to sum up a whole web of human relationships. I could fill a book with my dreams about cars and their wayward ways, their determination to thwart my efforts to get from A to B. We all have dreams about objects, familiar and unfamiliar, that play some sort of psychological role—that condense some psychic constellation into their coiled quiddity. The object seems to speak to us, to demand our attention; and yet it is still just an object (not like a cartoon character or a talking animal). Once again, then, we can discern a shared property of films and dreams, and perhaps we are psychologically prepared for the charged role of objects in films by the fact that this is a regular feature of our dream life. In both domains certain privileged objects are plucked from the usual clutter of stuff and implanted meaningfully into our minds—they come to inhabit that strange no-man's land between living consciousness and inert matter.
INTERPRETATION
Neither films nor dreams are inherently verbal—just think of the early days of silent films and of the dreams of animals and prelinguistic children. But linguistic practices have grown up around them: there is talk in films and dreams, and there is talk about films and dreams. As Wittgenstein would put it, there are “language games” of reporting our dream experiences and our film experiences. Dreams and films seem to lend themselves to this kind of follow-up chatter, even to demand it. We all know those individuals who insist on describing in great detail the movie they have just seen or the dream they just had—those people who are known in the technical scientific literature as movie or dream bores. They clearly feel a compulsion to verbalize what is not in itself verbal. And there are also those individuals who make their living engaging in such talk—movie critics and psychoanalysts (and theorists of film). There is clearly an appetite for commentary on dreams and films. Moreover, this commentary frequently takes the form of interpretation: the dream or movie presents itself as in need of deciphering in some way—the meaning seems obscure or hidden. We need not go the full Freudian hog with this in order to accept that dreams cry out for interpretation, even when the interpretation doesn't require any appeal to unconscious attitudes and feelings. Dreams and movies symbolize things, in some sense, and therefore need to be interpreted. A film may be really about the general question of racial inequality, say, even though it is explicitly only the story of one black man's invitation to dinner. A dream about forgetting my notes when about to give an important lecture might stand for my general anxiety about pontificating on philosophy. In both cases we have a primarily visual medium being translated into verbal discourse, where the verbal discourse tries to penetrate the meaning latent in the visual medium. We have an analysis of something that seems not to carry its full meaning on its face. Thus, in their need for interpretation, and in their propensity to be reported by their recipients, dreams and movies share a connection to language that is not inherent in them. More strongly, they appear to seek such a connection: there is an urge to tell in both cases. We want to be able to understand dreams and movies in verbal terms. Again, this underscores their psychological affinity. Maybe, indeed, the telling of movies is an offshoot of a prior urge to report our dreams.
STARS
I know I am not alone in sometimes dreaming of movie stars. I once had a dream in which I was explaining to some friends my lack of success in the dating game, and I sputtered out the words, “I'm not Brad Pitt, you know.” At that moment I realized that Brad Pitt himself was seated opposite me at the table and looking a little miffed. I apologized to him for taking his name in vain, and he took it in good part. Similar dreams are often reported by people I've talked to. Why might this be? Because people have already seen the movie stars in the dreams they have on a Friday night at the multiplex. If a movie is like a dream, then the characters in movies are like the characters in dreams. I dreamed about Brad Pitt because he was already a fixture in my dream landscape; I'd dreamed about him many times before—while seated with my face upturned at a movie screen. The intimacy involved in admitting him to my dream world simply mirrors the intimacy he commands by appearing in my screen dreams (I will talk more in chapter 7 about celebrity and the dream theory). This mingling of dream and film, this migration of characters from one to the other, is predictable if films are experienced as dreamlike. My brain put Brad into my dream because he has already featured in the dream state of movie watching; it makes no firm distinction, recognizes no fixed boundary. In their “deep structure” movies and dreams traffic in the same basic forms. And yes, when we speak of a star as “dreamy” or a “dreamboat,” we are latching onto something literally true. Of course, you are always the main star of your dreams—the lover, the action man, the moral crusader—but you are happy to play alongside the more public stars that feature in those communal dreams. My brain's dream producer gave Brad Pitt a cameo role in my dream, my night movie, because of his leading role in the light-projected kind I have seen so often. We dream of movie stars because they already carry the aura of the dream with them.
ACTIVE AND PASSIVE
Are we active or passive when we watch a film? Is the mind working or relaxing? We are both. We passively receive, through our sense organs, the images that populate the screen—simple seeing is a process of passive reception. But we also interpret what we see: we employ our imagination to construct the characters and story line, and this is an active business. This kind of imaginative seeing is an amalgam of active and passive, construction and reception. Similarly, when we dream we are simultaneously active and passive. We feel ourselves to be passive recipients of the experiences that crowd our consciousness, as if we are simply seeing things; but it is also true that the dream is an imaginative product—something actively put together. We are thus a passive audience of the dream and an active creator of it. I will leave it to the critic Bruce Kawin to derive the obvious conclusion, as explicitly as I could possibly wish:
Watching a film and having a dream are both passive and active events. The dreamer/audience is physically cushioned in a darkened room, most of his movements restricted to slight shifts of position in a bed or chair, and mentally in various degrees of alertness, watching a visual process that often tells a story and often masks/presents some type of thought. In both cases the eyes move and the mind exercises creative attention. The dreamer might be considered more creative since the dream manifests his own thought processes, but the role of the film audience is also an active one since the viewer creates his own experience of the work… Although the dreamer is completely responsible for the dream, he usually avoids this awareness and casts himself in the role of participant or spectator; although the filmmakers are responsible for the movie, the viewer decides which film to attend and so chooses the general content of his experience. Thus dreamer and film-goer approach a middle ground of pseudo-responsibility for what is watched.20
This puts the point nicely, though I would prefer to emphasize the active role of the imagination in creating the movie we “watch;” for in a real sense the movie takes place inside our own head—the screen is merely the trigger for this inner activity. So in this subtle interweaving of passivity and activity, wherein the actively constructed presents the aspect of the passively received, we find the distinctive character of the two types of experience. We are authors of our dreams and of the movies we “watch,” but we feel ourselves to be merely their passive audience. This curious hybrid state unites the movie experience with the dream experience in a unique and powerful way.
Five
REVIEWING THE DREAM THEORY
WAKING DREAMS
Having pointed out the many virtues of the dream theory of film experien
ce, I now want to address some objections to this theory. The most obvious objection can be bluntly put as follows: watching a film can't be like being in a dream because you are awake while watching a film. Dreaming is a sleeping activity of the mind, but movie watching involves full waking consciousness of the world around you. How then can watching a movie be like being in a dream? Although it is certainly true that you are not asleep while watching a film, and that you are while having a dream, the relationship between wakefulness and dreaming is not as simple and clear-cut as the objection assumes. Remember, to begin with, those intermediate states of consciousness I mentioned in the previous chapter—hypnagogic imagery and NREM sleep. A person gradually enters the full sleep state, and gradually emerges from it. There are times at which it is simply not clear whether the person is awake or not—they are “half-awake” or “semiconscious.” We are more or less unconscious. Our sleep can be light or deep. Perhaps what we call waking might just as well be described as extremely light sleep, as sleep might be seen as very diminished wakefulness (we are certainly very alert during REM dreaming sleep). It's not an all-or-nothing thing; it's more of a continuum. The movie watcher, then, might be described as entering a light sleep, an alteration of consciousness approximating sleep. And I think it is undeniable that the consciousness of the movie watcher is trancelike. You enter a state of being mesmerized. The movie exerts a hypnotic effect on you. Such states are in the same family as regular sleep. The experience of leaving the theatre often involves rubbing the eyes, stretching, blinking—generally acting as if you have just been roused from sleep. And there is that tuning out of everything except for the film, which happens mainly in the head anyway.
There is an even more telling point to be made: the dreaming mind is not confined to the sleeping hours. We often recall our dreams during the day, spontaneously or because we are reminded of them; we may then recycle the dream experience in our waking consciousness, savoring it or recoiling from it. When this occurs, the dream mechanisms are reactivated—the experience of the dream is rerun in attenuated form. So the content of a dream experience can occur in full consciousness, though as a remnant of an earlier dream. It is not that dreaming and waking are sealed compartments; one bleeds into the other. We dream about what we experience during waking hours, and we also sense the echoes of our dreams in our conscious hours. The dreaming mind has not totally shut down during the day. Also, unconscious dream work goes on during the day, so that the unconscious mind is active with dream concerns when the conscious mind is otherwise engaged. Movie watching is therefore accompanied by unconscious dream activity. It is oversimplified to suppose that the dreaming mind only wakes up, so to speak, during sleep.
But there is a yet more dramatic demonstration of the compatibility of dreaming and wakefulness: namely, insanity. Psychologists have often pointed to the kinship between insanity and the dreaming mind: the schizophrenic is locked in a permanent paranoid dream, and the dreamer is a temporary schizophrenic. J. Allan Hobson has given striking evidence that the dreaming mind is highly akin to the state of delirium, in his book Dreaming as Delirium.1 It turns out that the chemical state of the brain is markedly similar in dreaming and delirium, which is not surprising in view of the evident psychological similarities—distorted reality sense, disorganized thought processes, hallucinatory images. But the mentally disturbed person is not, in any ordinary sense, asleep, so the dream process can be activated in a full-blooded fashion in conscious subjects. The dreaming mind can be fully active in people who are completely awake; the dream machinery is whirring away, though not in a state of conventional sleep. There is thus no logical bar to supposing that movie watchers have their dream minds brought into operation. It isn't, of course, that movie watching is a form of insanity (but then there are those “movie nuts”…); it is just that the case of insanity shows that wakefulness and dreaming are not mutually exclusive. The dreaming mechanisms can be activated in different ways, to different degrees, in different circumstances, while the rest of the mind is doing whatever may be called for. There is no simple dichotomy between sleeping and dreaming, on the one hand, and not sleeping and not dreaming, on the other. We might say, being cautious, that in movie watching the dreaming mind is partially activated, meaning that the whole panoply of the typical dream state is not in play. Or we could say that movie watching is a hybrid state, mixing dream elements and waking elements. In any case, there is no commitment on the part of the dream theory to the dubious claim that movie watching is a type of sleeping.
A few words about daydreams are in order. The occurrence of daydreams is further evidence that the dreaming mind is not active only during sleep, since it is very plausible to suppose that the mechanisms in the brain that allow daydreams to be generated are the same as those that manufacture night dreams, or at least there is an overlap. A powerful reverie, perhaps under the influence of a stimulant or a fever, surely resembles dreaming in many ways—the dreaming mind on its day shift, as it were. Clearly, daydreams occur during our waking hours, so again the dream mechanisms can do their thing in the glare of daylight, though in a modified form.
But this raises the question of why I don't compare movie watching to daydreams instead of night dreams. Well, there are some similarities, as we would expect given that the two types of dreaming are themselves similar, but there are also important dissimilarities. The main one is that daydreams are driven by the conscious will of the daydreamer—she is in control of what she daydreams. You can decide what to have a daydream about, and you can decide when to end it; what goes in your daydream is pretty much what you choose.
Thus the agency behind the daydream is experienced by the daydreamer as coming from inside. But the agency behind both night dream and movie is experienced as coming from outside: it is important to both that they be experienced passively, as not coming from the viewer's own will. Only this will allow for the kind of surprise that can accompany both dreaming and movie watching—things happen that you can't predict. But your daydreams predictably play out what you decide to put in them (consider a typical sexual fantasy): this can be gratifying, but it lacks somewhat in the suspense department. Movies specialize in suspense, so they are decidedly not like daydreams. You don't control what comes up on the movie screen, as you do on your inner daydreaming screen.
Secondly, daydreams are simply not as vivid as dreams. Except in pathological cases, daydreams do not overpower, unman, shatter; but dreams can do all this and more. The power of film thus needs a more robust analogue than the thin and paltry image of the daydream—something with more heft and thud. The night dream can dominate consciousness in a way no daydream can, and its individual images attain a degree of clarity and clout that daytime images cannot match; this is what we need to capture the charged intensity of the movie image. The daydream is more like a shadow-puppet show, performed with your own hands, instead of a tidal wave of heightened reality coming right between your eyes.
YOU YOURSELF
It may now be objected that there is a crucial disanalogy between film and dream—namely, that dreams are always about you, the dreamer, while movies are never about you (unless you are the kind of person to have films made about you). You always crop up in your dreams like a bad penny, but unless you are a screen actor you don't crop up in the movies you watch. Again, this is quite true—but the situation is a little subtler than the objection allows. Self-centeredness is a very peculiar property of dreams: is it a mark of our habitual human egocentricity, or does it reflect some deep truth about the very structure of dreaming? For it is not that you mostly dream about yourself, as you may mostly talk about yourself; it is not that you regularly put yourself at the center of your dreams, but occasionally let someone else take the lead role. So this is not common or garden-variety selfishness, as if you have an overweening desire to hog the dream limelight. It is rather that you can't dream about anyone else—you necessarily put yourself at the center. Why? Isn't it at least logically possible that you
might have a dream in which you are mercifully absent? Why can't you dream about your friends and family having an adventure, with you not even in the picture? (You could certainly write a story like that.) The dream scripts seem to be inexorably drawn toward the dreamer; yet it is hard to see why this should be a rigid necessity. What is it about dreaming consciousness that forces such egocentricity on dreams? Take the least self-centered person in the world, totally self-effacing, never talks or even seems to think about himself—he still dreams exclusively and obsessively about himself every night for hours! This ought to strike us as puzzling, and I admit I have no good explanation for it—it has perplexed me for a long time. One interesting aspect of the question is that it does at least raise the conceptual possibility of dreams that are not self-centered, so that films might approximate this logically conceivable type of dream (though not the dreams regular folks have). But this is less than satisfactory from my point of view, because I want movies to resemble the dreams that humans actually have, not the kind they might have in some possible world in which they dream less egocentrically So what should we say of the disanalogy that obtains between dreams as we actually have them and films? I think the objection can be turned on its head: the ego-centricity of dreams helps in generating a certain attitude that defines our relationship to the screen. I mean the attitude of identification. There are two sorts of identification to consider: identification with the camera and identification with a character on the screen. The camera views the action from a specific position, its own movements affecting what appears on the screen. We naturally identify with the camera, so that we are brought into visual relation to the action: if it is two feet from the heroine's face, then it is as if we are; if it moves, it is as if we are moving too. Our own eye is identified with the eye and angle of the camera, so that we are placed inside the action through this identification—we certainly don't experience the action as if we were looking at it from the other side! But it is the second sort of identification that really bears the imprint of the dream: you may not be literally up on the screen yourself, but you identify with the people who are. This identification may be monogamous or promiscuous: you may pick a single character and stick with him throughout the film, typically the designated hero; or you may shift your allegiance back and forth, now choosing this person, now that. Whatever you do, there is always someone on the screen whose place you are imaginatively occupying; and without this your involvement would be greatly diminished. You are forever putting yourself in a screen character's shoes, empathizing with him, feeling his pain. Often, though not always, this is because you feel you have been in something like his predicament, so that you can easily imagine what it must be like to be him. When I watch Brief Encounter(probably my favorite film), I feel a strong sense of identification with the female lead, Laura, played by Celia Johnson, and less with the male lead, Alec, played by Trevor Howard—probably because I feel a stronger resemblance of personality between Laura and myself. In any case, there is no doubt that I feel myself to be up there on the screen, right with her. People often report that they feel a particular film to be “about me”—about their own lives.
