Do dreams inform the grammar of cinema or is it the other way around?

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Dreams are notoriously bonkers. And yet there is a sort of logic to them which is not unlike the grammar of cinema. Dreams, for example, sometimes have "cuts." That is, we inexplicably move from one scene to another, in defiance of the conventional flow of time. There are perspectival shifts. I have, for example, gone from first-person "everyday" experience in a dream to become a disembodied "viewer" objectively watching things play out.

We spend a great deal of our live asleep. We dream and hallucinate during these periods. A good deal of the experience we have is this sort of simulated experience. Film is also a simulation of experience.

My question is, do "cuts," for example, in film possibly reflect dream logic? Or rather, is it possible that our experience of film (our lives, after all, are deeply narrative, and films offer a visual "Bible" for visual narrative). With regard to the latter, have you ever had a Tetris dream? Some of you who have played too much Tetris may have had this experience--and this is an experience of a simulated reality structuring another simulated reality. Are we watching "films" when we dream? Have our dream worlds--the "rules" of dreaming shaped the cinematic arts? Is it a bit of both?



Both could happen, but good luck teasing it out. A wild card in this is that people generally do not recall MOST of their dreams. It's mainly the ones that happen just before waking or the ones that actually wake you up. When people DO remember dreams, they are mainly fragments with a narrative that they fill in with details from waking thoughts, not even good facsimiles of what happened in the dream since they fade in minutes.

Lots of authors have claimed inspiration from a dream, but it's kernel of an idea, not a coherent plot or dialog. I do recall dreams that seemed like they came from movies I saw, but it was more like the movie seen on acid and only a snippet at that....like "I know that was Indiana Jones, but what was he doing in a Target in Idaho, buying choir robes getting a Subway sandwich?" Yeah, they don't carry choir robes in Target and a Subway sandwich that's nothing but bread, mayo and pickles doesn't make much sense either and why was Indiana dressed in a tutu, but I KNEW that it was him.

Some brain researches have claimed that dreams are a way for the brain to consolidate memories and take out the trash. Since the dreams are often very strange and unlike my memories, I assume that the dream part is the trash. Psychologists have spent the past century trying to understand this and are not all that close.



I hate it when I'm dreaming that I'm at the store or the library or something, and I come across that unbelievable impossible to find film (Edwige Fenech in an Argento?!?!?) only to awaken to realize it was all a filthy lie.



I hate it when I'm dreaming that I'm at the store or the library or something, and I come across that unbelievable impossible to find film (Edwige Fenech in an Argento?!?!?) only to awaken to realize it was all a filthy lie.
Not only that, but I find myself profoundly disappointed that my scumbag brain is a terrible screenwriter. I would savagely critique a film with the plot holes, horrible tropes, formal cliches, etc. that my dreams have. I awaken and realize that I have an uninteresting and rather silly brain.



I'm with skizzer: I think it's an unanswerable question, but worth posing just because it's fun to unpack and consider. But even when dealing with the conscious mind the art-influencing-life-influencing-art cycle is tough to figure out, nevermind getting the subconscious involved.

Related thought: I think watching movies at all (particularly a lot of them) probably makes us dream more cinematically.



Related thought: I think watching movies at all (particularly a lot of them) probably makes us dream more cinematically.
This is my suspicion as well.



I really like that kind of thought. It reminds me of some observation I read, about that (maybe apocryphal?) story of the early short film that's just of a train, and how some shot where it comes towards the camera caused people in the theater to scream and run away. The writer said something about how every single person up to that point had known that, when they saw something coming towards them, it really was, and suddenly that was no longer true.

One wonders how screens have reshaped the way we think. One wonders if it makes us simply care about reality, in and of itself, a lot less, since we now have alternatives. This is, like your question, both unanswerable and important to try to answer anyway.



One wonders how screens have reshaped the way we think. One wonders if it makes us simply care about reality, in and of itself, a lot less, since we now have alternatives. This is, like your question, both unanswerable and important to try to answer anyway.
I've heard similar theories concerning the shift from oral storytelling traditions to "the dead letter" having an effect on human consciousness. I think that's true to some extent, of course, but I'm usually put off by the presumption among those theorizing that this effect is necessarily deleterious, which I'm not convinced is the case. Or I'm not convinced at least that the pros are outweighed by the cons of that shift.



I've heard similar theories concerning the shift from oral storytelling traditions to "the dead letter" having an effect on human consciousness. I think that's true to some extent, of course, but I'm usually put off by the presumption among those theorizing that this effect is necessarily deleterious, which I'm not convinced is the case. Or I'm not convinced at least that the pros are outweighed by the cons of that shift.
Yeah, might be one of those things that's simultaneously true, but disproportionately referenced by people misinterpreting (or overstating) its downsides. For what it's worth, I'm pretty agnostic about this stuff, I tend to think there are always upsides and downsides. The posture I'm most sympathetic to is the small-c conservatism that just says "could be good, could be bad, but it's a huge change and therefore potentially quite risky." Specifically because we can't ever hope to really understand how it changes us and because changes which change our own minds, the thing we'd use to evaluate the value of each change, are particularly vulnerable.



Not only that, but I find myself profoundly disappointed that my scumbag brain is a terrible screenwriter. I would savagely critique a film with the plot holes, horrible tropes, formal cliches, etc. that my dreams have. I awaken and realize that I have an uninteresting and rather silly brain.
I don't think it's the best idea to look for dreams to provide coherency in one's narrative inspiration. The tropes and cliches are most useful in examining one's own symbolic psychic structure though. I don't quite agree with skizzerflake that this amounts to "trash". It is a rumination of undigested stuff, but not psychic "gas" so to speak. I tend to be more Jungian than Freudian here. I think that's why I prefer illucid dreaming. I think that dreams are far more interesting when they offer surprising and often confounding matter. I may also have a slightly better ability to remember my dream matter than some, but the illogic is a feature, not a bug.


Concerning the cosmic shifts, I do have them. With games, it's more chess and sudoku than tetris. One example from a couple of months ago, I had a dream where I was making a film that, due to unforeseen circumstances, devolved into some kind of cannabilistic orgy. I had somehow gotten John Cusack to provide the theme song, "Punk Takes An Inch". I shifted between filming the scenes, being an active participant in them, and watching the final product at a school screening (I had been shooting on campus), where, for god knows, one of my film profs/judges was an 80s mustachioed Bill Clinton, who angrily claimed that my film was "dangerous". So I said, "**** you, Bill Clinton!!!", grabbed the film canister and ran out. Since the school felt they owned my negative, they came after me yelling "thief!!!", and down the street, as they closed in on me, I threw the film can into an open window on a passing by school bus, which then exploded. In the confusion, I took refuge under some kind of bleacher scaffold, where I started to hear some awful, demonic laughter. At this point, close to waking, I was suffering that dream paralysis where it feels like an extraordinary effort to crawl, as I tried to see where this laughter was coming from. The best I could manage was to peak over the edge of the scaffolding where all I saw was part of a head with a single hot wild eye staring at me with ill intent. I woke with a start. Oh, there was grammar that morning, my friend. Lots of verbs.



Ditto.
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