by Colin Mcginn
So the self is not so absent from the movies as may initially appear. And I conjecture that the prevalence of the self in dreams aids this process of identification: we are just so used to finding ourselves the center of the action in our dreams that we readily insert ourselves into those celluloid dreams. Given that movies resemble dreams in other ways, we naturally locate ourselves in the stories being told—we bring them even closer to the dream by the mechanism of identification. So it is not required that the films you see be literally about you in order that the structure of your relationship to them duplicate that of the dream; it is enough that they approximate this structure—and identification permits this.
WHAT WE SEE
We see the images on the screen, but while dreaming we don't see anything—our eyes are closed, and we are fast asleep. The film is literally an object of vision, but the dream is at best an object of the mind's eye. So aren't they importantly different? Again, there is truth to this, but it is oversimplified. First, as I have noted, the movie that we “see” is largely a product of our imagination. The images we literally see are splashes of light that act as stimuli to our constructive mental processes: we don't see the characters and scenes at all—we imagine them. So movie watching is heavily imaginative, just as dreaming is. Yet it is still true that we see the images on the screen, even if the characters and story line are accessed by the imagination. But again, matters are blurrier than we might suppose, because we also perceive sensory stimuli during dreaming sleep, and these stimuli can find their way into our imaginative constructions as we dream. Thus consider the well-known example of the alarm clock and the wedding bells: the sound from the clock enters the dreamer's ears and as a result he experiences wedding bells in the dream he is having. He has interpreted the alarm clock in a certain way and incorporated the sound in the story line of his ongoing dream. This kind ofthing happens all the time, and indeed it was once believed that all dream images result from perceived stimuli being incorporated into the dream. But then, dreams can result from the perception of stimuli in the environment, as a hand passing over the eyelids may be experienced within the dream as a plane overhead. It is in fact possible to manipulate a person's dreams by such means. In principle, I daresay, one could control the entire course of someone's dream by deft choice of external stimuli, though how the dreamer interprets such stimuli will be up to her. So there is no incompatibility between seeing and hearing, on the one hand, and dreaming, on the other—indeed, the very things seen and heard may play a constructive role in generating dream content.
But isn't this, structurally, just like the movie case? The images on the screen are put there to manipulate the viewer's imagination, so that perceiving and imagining can mix in a fruitful act of mental construction. Suppose we developed a technology for dream manipulation that bombarded the sleeper with stimuli in such a way that we could determine the course of the dream (at least up to the point at which the sleeper's interpretative processes intervened): wouldn't this be essentially like what we now do with movie stimuli? Certainly, the fact that the dream is thus controlled has no tendency to show that the subject is not dreaming! Dreams, as I said, can be produced by outside stimuli reaching the dreamer's senses. So there isn't the sharp distinction between dreaming and movie watching that the present objection presupposes. Watching a movie is like dreaming about the stimuli that reach us from the screen. It's all alarm clocks and wedding bells.
DREAMS AND ART
Dreams are not art and movies are. Dreams are artifice— human constructs made with the imagination—but dreams are shapeless, chaotic, meaningless, inartistic. Now it is tempting to reply that a great many films aren't art, either. But this is too easy a reply, since even the most artistically challenged film has a kind of structure and shape that dreams sorely lack, and the most coherent and meaningful dream can't compete with a serious dramatic film for artistic accomplishment. It makes, indeed, little sense to try to evaluate dreams aesthetically: we don't have dream critics the way we have movie critics. Dreams can contain some striking visual effects, but watching a serious filmic work of art doesn't seem much like the regular run-of-the-mill dream from an aesthetic point of view. Are we to say, then, that only the least artistic films are really dreamlike? Is it that when confronted by a decent film, the brain says: “I thought this was going to be a dream, but it's far too artistic for that, so it can't be”? That would be a major concession on the part of the dream theory, a big letdown.
However, even if we took that line, there would still be all the other resemblances I have cited, so the analogy would not be totally hobbled. But I think we can say something stronger, and more interesting: a movie is a dream idealized. A movie is a dream as we wish we had them. It would be nice if our dreams could be finer things, stories worth putting on paper and selling to Hollywood. It would be wonderful to wake up in the morning with recollections of Shakespeare-quality (or even Spielberg-quality) dreams. Our dreams are just not that entertaining, and they stink in the retelling. A dream may supply an idea for a film, but it will require a lot of reworking before anyone will green-light it.
In short, movies improve on dreams; a movie is a dream that has been artistically shaped and edited. What we experience in the movie theatre, then, is not the rough cut of a typical dream, but a dream as it has been rendered into art. Accordingly, part of what we are responding to, and appreciating, is the elevation of the dream to a higher level. We perceive the dreamlike quality of the film—as indicated by the other markers I have enumerated—and in addition we sense the improvement on the homegrown product. It is like a dream, only better. We get to have a dream, with all its power and pizzazz, and as a bonus we are treated to a superior version of dreaming. What could be better? Film is not the dream unfiltered, neat, but the dream as it is in our dreams—films are the dreams we dream of having. If only they could be inserted straight into our brains, so that they could take over from the usual crappy dreams we have! If only the dream studio in our heads could be taken over by a really crack producer! The appeal of movies, then, partly involves their transcendence of their roots—their ability to transmute and advance the dream materials that essentially compose them. The history of film, accordingly, is the steady improvement of projected dreams (though some early films are artistically as accomplished as anything we see today). I had a dream, only last night, of surfing a wave, and I can see the glassy curvature in my mind's eye now; but I know very well that the latest surf movie will greatly improve on the experience for me—there will be a story, bigger waves, more of them, and so on. A film is really a dream as it aspires to be.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
Films are seen seated in a public place; dreams are had at home, in private, usually in a bed. Movie watching is communal; dreaming is solitary. Is this an objection to the dream theory? No, because these differences are entirely contingent, and superficial. Obviously, there is nothing to prevent you, in principle, from watching a movie alone, and the experience is not essentially different, somehow less “cinematic.” I often go to the movies alone in the afternoon, when there is hardly anyone else there, and yet I don't feel that I haven't really seen a movie. Equally, communal dreaming is a possibility: you could get together with other people in a big room and go off to sleep; and there is no logical bar to having the same dream they do. As for sleeping in a bed, you can dream while seated and watch a movie while lying flat.
BELIEF
In a dream you are not aware that you are dreaming, while in the movies you are aware that you are watching a movie.
A corollary of this is that you believe what you dream, but you don't believe what you see on the screen. There is a difference in the reflective knowledge possessed in the two cases. In the one case there is a confusion of the dream world with the real world, while in the other there is no confusion of the screened world with the real. What should we say to this?
First, never underestimate the power of absorption. Particularly with children
, but also with adults, there can be deep immersion in what appears on the screen, so that the rest of the world is forgotten, and no thought of being in a movie theatre spoils the flow of the film into the viewer's consciousness. He or she is there. This state—trancelike, fixated, and flooded—approximates the absorption characteristic of the dream. This is when the flinching at danger, the empathetic tears, the racing heart all come into play; the mind has departed its place in the movie theatre and entered the world of the film. Absorption is a matter of degree, and movie absorption is on a scale at the other end of which is the deep absorption of the dream. There is no sharp dichotomy here.
Secondly, we must not neglect the phenomenon of the lucid dream. This is the dream in which its status as dream is transparent to the dreamer (it may also permit the dreamer to control the course of the dream by conscious will). Such dreams are rare for most people, but in some they are common. It is as if the dream comes stamped with a sign that reads: “This Is Only a Dream.” Naturally, belief is not secured in such a dream state: if you know it is just a dream, you don't go around believing it. You may allow yourself to become absorbed in the fiction, but all along you are aware that that is what it is. This is very like the normal state of semiabsorption that accompanies adult immersion in a film: you may become absorbed in the story, but lurking in the margins of awareness is the knowledge that you are really in a movie theatre. The fiction is tagged as such in your consciousness of it. So the precise analogue to this kind of movie watching is the lucid dream. The ordinary dream may lack the kind of reflective understanding commonly found in the movies, but lucid dreaming restores the analogy. So, to be very precise, we might say that movies most resemble lucid dreams—but they are dreams, nonetheless.
THE SCREEN
Movies are seen on a screen, and dreams are not: isn't that a disanalogy? Well, movies cost money to see, and dreams do not—that doesn't cut very deep. To be sure, I earlier rejected the notion of a mental screen on which our dreams are projected—there is no such screen. But the screen of the movie theatre is really a vanishing screen: you don't see the screen once the movie has started, as I pointed out in chapter 2. The screen is not part of your subjective experience; it is merely part of the actually existing apparatus. The presence of the screen is entirely virtual—more of an absence, really. The screen does not act to negate the dreamlike impression created by the movie, because it is simply too recessive, too ancillary. If there were no solid screen, but just empty air magically producing the image, it would make no real difference to the movie-watching experience. The screen is no more vital to the experience than the curtain in front of it is.
DREAMLIKENESS
I hear a voice protesting from the back row: “You say that movies are like dreams, but movies sure don't seem like dreams—you don't find yourself thinking ‘Golly this is so dreamlike’ as you watch a movie. In fact, the only time you ever think something like that is when the film includes a dream sequence—you know, with hazy lights and echoing voices. The rest of the time movies seem totally, urn, realistic.” If I am not mistaken, I have already answered this objection in the last chapter: dreams don't seem dreamlike, either. We have two perspectives on dreams, from the inside and from the outside. From the outside, in retrospect, dreams strike us as dreamlike, not easily confusable with real events; their bizarreness and lack of consonance with the rest of our experience is evident. But from the inside, while we are having them, they don't strike us as dreamlike at all (unless we are having a lucid dream); they strike us as totally, urn, realistic. So it is essential for films to be dreamlike that they not seem dreamlike. Doses of surrealism subvert this condition, which is why surrealism is misleading about the nature of dream experience—surrealist works capture only the outside perspective. Ordinariness is the essential characteristic of the inside perspective—as if this could happen to anyone at any time.
COMEDY
Comedy provides an interesting challenge. Do we have humorous dreams? If not, there is one genre of film that has no dream counterpart, so that watching a comedy at least isn't dreamlike. Now it is true, I think, that we do not experience laughter in our dreams: that is, we don't find ourselves with the attitude of amusement in mid-dream. Dreams are a solemn and serious affair. Some people I have talked to dispute this, maintaining that they do have comedy dreams; but upon closer examination they always seem to mean that they dream about funny things—which is not the same thing. It is quite true that funny things occur in dreams, and people often derive a lot of amusement recounting their dreams for others (the others are often somewhat less amused). But, again, this is an outside view of the dream, not an inside view. If I dream of turning into a tortoise and finding it hard to get across the road before a car hits me, I may have dreamed something hilariously funny in the telling, but you can be sure it didn't feel too funny as I was dreaming it. So I doubt that dream amusement occurs, at least in anything like the form it takes while we are awake (in contrast, fear and elation do occur in dreams). But then, I have a bit of a theoretical problem: comedy films aren't like any dream state we are accustomed to, so they seem like a counterexample to the theory.
I think the reply to this is that for comedy films to be like dreams, dreams don't need to have amusement occurring within them. What they need is for the kinds of things that comedy films contain to occur within them. After all, in all the best comedies nobody is laughing in the film—the characters don't know they are in a comedy. They are behaving with perfect seriousness; it is we, the members of the audience, who find the whole thing enormously amusing. Take Dr. Strangelove: everybody in this film takes himself and his actions incredibly seriously—the film, after all, is about the nuclear threat. But we viewers are convulsed at their very solemnity and the bitter comedy of their bluster. In the same way, a dream can be funny without anyone within it ever cracking a smile—in particular, without the dreamer himself experiencing any amusement. Thus people will say, “I had a really funny dream last night—do you want to hear it?,” even when they report on how terrified they felt within the dream. So, yes, there are comedy dreams, after all, just as there are comedy films; but this doesn't require that the dreamer be amused inside the dream, as opposed to later. We all have our Charlie Chaplin dreams, in which we have big shoes, no home, and a peculiar walk, but we don't find these very amusing in the having of them. Also, of course, we may dream that someone is laughing, perhaps at our expense; but that doesn't mean that the emotion of amusement is being felt in the consciousness of the dreamer. When I am amused at the cinema, then, it is like my amusement at the recollection of a dream, not like my amusement from inside the dream, which is nonexistent. Still, it is a peculiar fact that the emotion of amusement doesn't seem to occur within dreams, though other emotions do.
THE MEDIUM
The final objection I want to consider is that the dream theory cannot be the whole story: there must be more to the movie experience than the analogy with dreams suggests, for we need to recognize the contribution made to the experience by the film medium itself. We need to make room for our visual relationship to the screen and the way the images on it affect our consciousness. The screen image has certain formal properties, to which we are perceptually related, and these properties will carry a meaning for the viewer in virtue of their intrinsic nature. The dream theory omits mention of these formal properties and their significance, so it cannot be a complete theory of the movie experience. For example, film images are two-dimensional and composed of light— how does this empirical fact fall within the dream theory? Nothing in my head is flat and composed of light when I dream!
