Arts The Turn
posted by on August 16 at 10:24 AM
This is the first paragraph of a film review, “Bad Dreams,” I wrote nearly six years ago:
Why do I dislike Luis Buñuel? Because he was a surrealist, and I dislike surrealism because it takes all of its clues from dreams. And I hate dreams because they bother my sleep. In a word, I dislike Buñuel because I don’t like dreams. Dreams are bad! They do nothing except bring life to sleep. And sleep should be unto death, with nothing on the mind’s screen, or mind-dome (in the Truman Show sense), just blackness, emptiness—pure oblivion from which one awakes not traumatized by the dream-state/real-life transition, but reinvigorated by the journey to and from the land of the dead.
The end of that review:
Dreams are useless. Ignore them, and don’t try to decipher them like Joseph of Egypt.Speaking of Egypt, the ancient Egyptians believed that when one went to sleep, the sun, which had fallen in the real world, rose in the dream world. It was not a dream sun, but the actual sun that blazed over the shimmering terrain of this other place. If I were a sleeping Egyptian, I would have desired nothing more than a powerful gun to shoot down the ball of light from the sky so that the dream world and the real world collapsed into one great darkness.
I have now changed my thinking about dreams, and as a consequence changed my thinking about Buñuel, particularly his later films. The reason for the change? At the time of writing the review “Bad Dreams” I was, one, on the side of Nabokov in the war he started against Freud and dream interpretation, and, two, I had not yet lost a loved one? In sum, dreams counted for nothing but a waste of time and a bother. But after, one, realizing that any economic explanation of exploitation was incomplete without an explanation of the mental forms and physical nature of desire, and, two, losing a loved one, I came to see the value of dreams.
Dreams are above all good for this: the revival of the dead. Even last night a loved dead returned to a dream in my head. She entered a bright room and sat next to me on a couch. And there is no other way to feel the reality of a departed person except this way, in a dream. You can actually speak to them, hold them, share food with them. The feeling is wonderful because there is no sense of an illusion. The person is actually alive.
Now, in the movie Strange Days there is a device that allows the user to physically experience a memory. You can go back to a happy time and re-experience it. This however is not as good as a dream experience because it is in the end just a recording and not something that is happening in real time.
The ones we love must be in time. We must share the same time with them. If not, they are dead to us. The greatness of a dream is that it tricks the sleeper into the illusion of real time. You talk to the dead with a sense of “time future” and “time past,” a sense of “time present,” the eternity of the here and now. With the recording device in Strange Days, it is simply the illusion of “time past.” The dream is the illusion of time’s flow. And it is only in the flow of things (the light in her room, the smell of her hair, the black back of her hands, the texture of her couch) that we feel the presence of real happiness.
I was moved.
Wow, your writing has improved a thousand-fold since you wrote that review. Good on ya, and I'm glad you've changed your mind about dreams. Dreams are a wonderful source of peak experiences available to everyone, and it seems a shame to dismiss them as useless.
It is always astonishing to come across old friends that no longer exist in my dreams. I always feel very lucky to have had the chance to see them again.
I loved that review, but I love this even more.
Lovely sentimentality to lighten my mood, thanks! As for your old stance on dreams/surrealism, I totally disagreed at the time I read that review. I'm willing to take the stupid dreams where I'm trying to find a clean bathroom for hours in exchange for the cool ones where I get to have lesbian makeouts with Winona Ryder and kill monsters with bitchin' kung fu. Even the dull dreams where I'm wandering aimlessly through environments of incredible detail oddly stitched together form the stuff of waking life, these things refresh my brain. Surrealism and dreams can both suck sometimes, but when they win, there's nothing better.
I dont dream much any more. Anyone that doesn't like dreaming should try living without dreams.
And I mean dream in the literal sense, not they desire for a better and more awesome life.
Bellevue- You're probably just not remembering your dreams. The wall of forgetfulness that separates dreams from life is an interesting thing. I think it becomes more powerful when you have a day job that forces you to go from unconscious to fully functioning in rapid succession. If you get a chance to live like a total slouch for a while, just lay in bed when you wake up and focus on your dreams for a while. After a few weeks of that, you'll remember your dreams more easily.
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Isn't that the very strangest thing, Charles? Except I always get caught with awareness of the past in the dream (so I am made to feel foolish for having believed that they were dead) and then face the horrible disappointment of waking.
Well, the beauty of the devices from Strange Days was that you could experience ANYONE'S memories, not just your own. Just because the main character was reliving the happier past of his own life (something people do just fine without technology...), doesn't mean this was all there was to it.
I find other people's dreams to be unbelievably boring, which I guess explains why I can't stand Buñuel.
There is a tendency of people who have a positive relationship with their subconscious mind to lose perspective about dreams the same way parents lose perspective about their kids. Some stories from dreams and child-rearing can be interesting to other people; most are not, because the only significance they have is personal.
I say don't let the boring dream stories you've heard put you off the interesting ones. Blue Velvet is a dream most people agree is worth stepping into. Check stuff out.
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for year's after a close friend's suicide, i would see him in my dreams and feel overwhelmed with joy to have him close to me again. it made waking up a kind of excruciating punishment, as though each time he visited me in a dream, he was killing himself all over again.
meanwhile, the dreams where i am a member of the Monkees keep on coming, so i guess it's an even trade off.
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