—Now that I think of it: it’s lucky that pretty soon I’ll forget all these magnificent jokes you’re making.
—Touché.
—Yes, better if you control yourself a bit. Which brings me to the fact that dreams can be controlled, directed. It takes real practice, of course. It’s what lamas and shamans do. “Lucid dreaming”: being aware you are dreaming and, based on that awareness, thinking you can do something with all of it. One of the post-Freudian branches of dream interpretation, but already mentioned by Aristotle and Saint Augustine of Hippo and the aristocrat and sinologist Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys, in his Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques. Not walking in your dreams but making dreams walk in the direction you want them to. Dreaming like writing and reading at the same time; though there are studies that discard the whole notion with a “you aren’t dreaming, you’re just half-asleep or half-awake.” And, though they don’t agree on this, researchers say the people who achieve it most easily are those who spend hours awake and plugged into videogames. And anyone, in the middle of a nightmare, takes control and says, “This is a dream and I’m going to wake myself up.” And they wake up.
—That’s true. I’ve had that happen.
—Another: negative emotions are more common in dreams. We experience moments of pleasure and happiness and even fear. But anxiety and bad desires take precedence. To kill or have someone die whom we detest. The most interesting thing is that the “heaviest” nightmares take place not in the depths of sleep, but when we’re on our way to waking up. So the most terrible thing that happens to us or that we happen to think of when we’re asleep, in our imagination, takes place close to reality, much closer than it seems … Again, the thing from before, a kind of cleansing.
—But with a vomitive more than a laxative, ha.
—And while we’re in the REM stage of sleep, the body reaches a state of complete paralysis. To keep you from acting out your dreams, to keep you from moving. There are times, especially after a very “real” nightmare, when you wake up and feel like you can’t move. And that’s because you really can’t. Sleepwalkers, on the other hand, suffer from an overstimulation of neurons. That’s why they move when they’re asleep or half-asleep, in a hybrid state between sleep and wakefulness. Somnambulism is one of the most interesting forms of parasomnia. The most interesting of all sleep disorders, like night terrors, bed wetting, narcolepsy, teeth grinding, talking and making love and eating and even texting while asleep, …
—Really? Seriously? And what do people text? “Guess what I’m dreaming?” Is there an emoticon to indicate you’re dreaming? An emoticon of an emoticon dreaming of another emoticon? There probably is, right?
— … and even always sleeping in a fetal position, which, according to some, is a way of confronting a daily lack of confidence, which is why they recommend, always, doing a full body stretch before getting up … And the so-called Exploding Head Syndrome, which consists of auditory hallucinations. It’s more common among children and …
—Is it true it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker?
—Yes and no. There’s no clear rule, but it can be risky. There are sleepwalkers who wake up terrified or screaming. Or wanting to throw themselves out a window.
—Never wake up a sleepwalker next to a window.
—The best thing to do is, without waking them, bring them back to bed. And this will definitely interest you: in 1996 they recorded for the first time, as a consequence of stress or drugs or alcohol, a form of somnambulism called sexsomnia: panting and masturbating while asleep and even raping the person in bed beside you and … No, don’t even think about it, we’re not going back to bed …
—Okay: no bed … I remember that Lady Macbeth was a sleepwalker. At a certain point two other characters in the play watch her pass by, asleep, and, yes, they decide it’s best not to wake her… And how right they were, no? I’ve read about a guy named Ken Parks, who stabbed his mother-in-law while asleep; and he was tried and declared innocent. And about the American editor Hugh Person, who strangled his wife while sleeping: guilty, eight years in prison, insane asylum … But enough bloodshed. I don’t want to have nightmares tonight … Let’s talk about more peaceful things … Have you recorded baby’s dreams? And dreams of sleepwalking parents who can’t sleep because of the crying of their kids who wake up crying after dreaming things more abstract than figurative? And back to the thing from before: have you recorded the dreams of sleepwalkers? I guess it wouldn’t be easy to record them, right? Really long cables and coming unplugged all the time and …
—You’re making me sleepy … So, to wrap this up, the idea of the universality of certain dreams. Common dreams and dreams in common. To dream of a death or of a house. To dream of being naked, of flying, of falling, of being lost, of feeling like you’re being chased, or of running through the halls of your school and arriving late to that important class. Or of Jesus Christ or the divinity of your choice smiling at the foot of your hospital bed. Or of that light at the end of the tunnel which is nothing but a cataclysm in our cerebral chemistry thinking maybe now it’s time to bow out … But who has determined these to be the hit-single dreams and on what basis? … Or who are the people who came to the conclusion that they can dream the dreams of others in certain metal beds or on certain hotel mattresses, surfaces believed to be more prone to receive and transmit a certain type of short longitudinal wave? That’s why, they explain and justify, in hotels we always have dreams that are strange, inappropriate, other, dreams that don’t correspond to the coordinates of our normal oneiric pathways …
—Ah, so in hotels we’re tourist dreamers …
—There are so many absurd theories … There’s nothing easier than theorizing about the unknown … Is there anything that better combines the idea of the strange with the idea of the familiar than dreams? Anything is valid. From the idea that our life is nothing but the dream of a superior being to the theory that … whatever you want. Thus the need to normalize it, to shine light on it, to clean it up. To wake it all up … Like that thing they say about the dreams of cancer patients …
—What do they say?
—They say they’re spectacular. Pure special effects. Almost lysergic dreams. You no longer dream that you’re naked or flying, but that the whole world is flying and has been stripped naked. Optimists claim they’re “healing dreams.” That it’s the mind’s way of laying waste to all of reality and, in the process, of distracting you from the bad trance you find yourself in.
—Ah, the chemotherapy version of dreams. Dreams like radiation bombarding nightmare cells …
—Or that other one, “in style” a while back: dreaming about that mysterious man people all over the world said they dreamed about, remember? That man with no face. “This man” they said. This Man. And there were those who sought an archetypal explanation à la Jung, for whom [unlike Freud, for whom dreams were everything] dreams were more than everything. Or the ones who talked about the viral phenomenon of mass hysteria and collective suggestion contracted and propagated by so many others on the Internet. And those inclined toward the idea of the dream-surfer: the meddlesome astral traveler leaving behind his body, someone with the ability to enter the dreams of others and …
—Ah, like a Freddy Krueger; but at all ages and with better intentions. Or like the Sandman …
—I never said anything about his intentions being good.
—Ah, so what did he do? Why did he appear to people? Did he warn them about accidents? Did he give them the winning lottery numbers?
—Not that I know of … And who is Freddy Krueger?
—That guy from the horror movies. With knives in his gloves and a burned face and that striped sweater and that hat. The one who appeared to teenagers in their dreams and killed them while they slept and so they tried not to fall asleep and … But you told me you were a cinophile … How do you not know who Freddy is?
—I am a cinophile, b
ut of good cinema.
—Ah … And regarding what you were saying … On your list of universal dreams, you missed one. One of the important ones.
—Which?
—You know …
—Which?
—Eh … Ah … Let’s not forget about the universal dream of meeting the woman of your dreams.
—That’s not a common or universal dream.
—And meeting the man of your dreams?
—Nope. Meeting the woman of your dreams only in your dreams would be a contradiction and an absurdity. Nobody likes to dream that. And then to wake up. In any case, it’s a waking and romantic dream. A daydream. Like in the movies when the colors brighten and the music swells and a man and a woman run toward each other in slow motion.
—Which brings me to what interests me most. The thing that led me to interview the people who run the Onirium and, then, to find you at long last. The woman of my dreams. That girl. Her. And for you to find me and that I had also appeared in your dreams and …
—I’d rather not talk about that, okay?
—I get it. I get you. It’s like insisting too much on the description of something magical. You always run the risk of discovering the trick and, though it may not be the case, it all turns out to have been just a dream and …
—You said, “Which brings me to what interests me most …” right?
—Right. Understood. Indirect direct hit and right on target … I was saying, for my next project, I wanted to know how to film dreams. How to show them and make people see them. And I want to be as faithful as possible to what it’s like. I’m not interested in being easily dreamlike and taking advantage of that everything-valid in the oneiric imaginary. I have something here Susan Sontag wrote, an introduction to an Icelandic writer, almost the last one she wrote, where she stipulates that “Time and space are mutable in the dream novel, the dream play. Time can always be revoked. Space is multiple.” But that’s not what attracts me most, that free will of the sleeper. Just the opposite. I wanted to bring some rigor and discipline to all of that. Impose a few rules on this game … I have a few examples I’d like to bring up with you. In fact, when I called the Onirium on the phone, they told me I was lucky because “one of our specialists is a big cinophile.” And that’s you and …
—Get to the point. Stop telling me about your movie.
—Okay, alright. What I was telling you. There are many movies with dream sequences and none of them really do it for me. To begin with, there’s Sherlock Jr., with Buster Keaton. And, in literature, there’s even a great story, one of Vladimir Nabokov’s few favorites [ah!, that was the name he couldn’t remember!]. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by the then twenty-something and perfect Delmore Schwartz: everything in that story is a dream turned into a movie … I’ve got a list of them here that, in a way, configure a brief history of the dream on the big screen. Let’s see … The Coen brothers and the dreams in Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski [that are like old dreams, dreams in movies in which dreams were telling something] and that other dream told while awake at the end of No Country for Old Men. Or the voiceover in the films of Terrence Malick, with the wind whipping the curtains [like the voice of someone talking in their sleep], or in those of Wong Kar-wai [that mood, that almost languid slowness in his oh so romantic films]. And the special cases, the trance films, dreamlike trips, missions like dreams: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now with Kurtz’s recorded voice whispering how he has dreamed of a snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor and surviving and “That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare.” … And, then, the classic options …
—Yes … Go on.
—Well, a classic example is the dream sequence that Salvador Dali designed for Alfred Hitchcock in …
—Spellbound! Agh! No! Never! Verboten. Redundant. The best dreamed parts in Hitchcock are the waking parts: those close-ups of objects, all that irreal backprojecting, those sets, those slow kisses, his speed of things … The same is true of the first Buñuel. There’s nothing less dreamlike than surrealism, though André Breton considered dreams a fundamental part of his credo, “communicating vessels.” The dream as surrealism is a cliché and banal and easy. Dreams are never surrealistic. We don’t think, “Wow, this is so surrealistic” while experiencing a dream. Dreams are a kind of alternative realism where, unlike waking realism, anything can happen. It’s realism without rules, without limits. But it is not surrealism.
—Tarkovsky.
—Tarkovsky makes me sleepy. He doesn’t make dreams.
—Fellini.
—Not him either. Almost for the same reasons. And it’s too personal and recognizable. One doesn’t have Fellinian dreams. One does not have Fellini dreams because one is not Fellini. Even though personal and individual and private elements appear in them, dreams are never entirely our own. They don’t have an aesthetic or a particularly marked style. Dreams have the style of dreams with the addition of some trace of whoever is dreaming them. But you couldn’t say that we put our own stamp on our dreams.
—And yet, I feel that my dreams are mine alone. That nobody else can dream or direct them like me. In fact, I have dreams in which I only appear at the beginning and the end, like a host, like the one who opens the door or the box. A little bit like Rod Serling’s role in The Twilight Zone, in those episodes of The Twilight Zone where life and death depend on dreaming or not dreaming or on reading or not reading. Or like in that great episode of Louie with the recurrent nightmare as a consequence of having refused to help someone. Or like the Man from Another Place, that dancing dwarf, in the “waiting room” in Twin Peaks.
—There we are in agreement. Above all in Mulholland Dr., which Lynch described as “a love story in the city of dreams” and the abbreviation Dr. as being as much of Drive as of Dream. The dream like a lost highway with confusing road signs and unexpected intersections. Things occur in David Lynch in a dreamlike way. As if in dreams. But they are dreams in which we never see the dreamer. The dreamer is outside. And the dreams seem, all the time, to be searching for him or waiting for him to wake up and try to wake them up. So you don’t watch David Lynch’s films, you dream them, better in the dark. That’s why what David Lynch does always has something of an opiatic quality, and on more than one occasion, produces in the spectator a fear that’s the same fear you feel confronting the unknown, in the face of not having the slightest idea what might happen next. Like in dreams, where we never know and struggle to have some control over the twists and turns of the plot … Yes, David Lynch is a case to pay attention to and consider with great care. The way time passes or doesn’t pass in David Lynch. And the constant allusions to dreams, to that obsession with thinking that “the dream is a code waiting to be deciphered.” But I think there’s someone who goes even further.
—Who?
—Ah … Robert Altman in 3 Women, a film almost nobody remembers that emerged from a dream its director had … And, of course, Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. The most dreamlike film ever filmed. What Kubrick does is very interesting and far more faithful to the feeling of a dream. Something similar happens in Casablanca. Not so much in strictly oneiric films, which are garbage though they mean well, like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life … Or a certain ingenuous romanticism, like the addicts of recording and watching their dreams over and over again on small screens in Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World … Or like Abre los ojos and its separated Siamese twin Vanilla Sky … Or those dreams in the narcoleptic clouds of My Own Private Idaho … Or like the overwhelming stupidity of Inception … That one is definitely completely absurd in its pretension that dreams can be something so rigorously narrative and linear and shared. That dreams have such a clear desire to dream and to be dreamed. Accustomed to them telling us something and to telling it all, we furnish and give the lie to our dreams in a successive and organized way when really everything in them happens in a multiple and simultaneous way. We intervene in them and correct them as if they were
a text, a text that we are reading or writing quickly in that notebook we have beside our bed. And then we proceed to decode them with those absurd dream dictionaries that claim to explain all possible meanings except for what it means to dream of a dream dictionary … We, here in the Onirium, are trying to do something about it and believe me …
—Do something?
—Yes … But …
—But …
—But I’m not really supposed to talk about it. It’s a confidential, revolutionary project. Something that, if achieved, would change the history of humanity …
—Ah …
—Ah, what?
—No, nothing …
—I don’t like that little smile of yours. What’s that little smile about?
—I can’t help it. When a scientist says that thing about “changing the history of humanity,” I always have the reflex of grabbing onto my chair and thinking “Here comes trouble.” That’s always how it goes in the movies and …
—Yes, we already know you’ve seen too many movies.
—No, seriously, please, don’t get mad. But it seems to me the majority of scientists only develop the theory after the practice. I’m not saying they don’t get results and illuminate wonders. But I always have the impression that in the majority of cases they arrive to them purely by chance. Like Viagra, remember? They were trying to develop something to make hair grow and, well, they found they could make something else grow …
—Yeah, I remember … But it wasn’t for growing hair. It was a medication for arterial hypertension and angina pectoris. You’re confusing it with minoxidil, which was a vasodilator, and then they discovered that it had very interesting side effects in what it did for capillary growth …
—There it is! You just said it! Side effects!
—What? What’re you talking about?
—That terminology: side effects. More words that make me shudder. “Side effects” is like “friendly fire” or “collateral damage” … I’m sorry, I can’t help it, but …
The Dreamed Part Page 11
