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?
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?