Ballad of a Slender Man

A few years back someone started an internet "hoax" about a mythical creature known as The Slender Man.  I hesitate to use the word "hoax", and I rope it off behind quotation marks, because even at the time of its origin, the creature was never presented as anything other than fake.  I'll say that again, as it bears repeating, The Slender Man was openly and clearly created as a made-up story.  It even appeared for the first time on a forum thread specifically designated for posting fake, photoshopped, paranormal images.  From there it grew on improvised details of child abductions and a catalog of manipulated images that amounted to the creepiest game of Where's Waldo? ever.  And yet, there are apparently people who believe that The Slender Man is real, and they report their own sightings without a touch of irony.

Which brings us to the point.  In the comments below the last post, Mr. Doug Cheese and I had a little tea party where we discussed spaghetti monsters and which one of us has the bigger crush on Justin Bieber (Doug, of course.)  I said that Richard Dawkins and the spaghetti folks base their entire case on the argument that people shouldn't believe something just because the possibility exists that it might be true.  The problem with this argument is that no one, to my knowledge, has ever believed something strictly because it was a possibility.  The poor bastard would be at the mercy of anything you told them.  You could tell them there was a giant pumpkin buried under the Statue of Liberty and they would start shifting anxiously in their seat, eager to get their hands on a shovel.

In fact, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a completely unfair model of belief, precisely because it's deliberately designed to be something that no one would ever seriously believe in.  It's a calculated absurdity.  It really tells us nothing about why someone would believe in something in the absence of solid evidence.  All it does is hold such people up to mockery, and try to make them look like buffoons.  It may be amusing, but it isn't enlightening.

On the other hand, we have The Slender Man here.  This is something that some people apparently do believe in, not merely in the absence of evidence, but with all available evidence actively pointing to the whole thing being an outright fabrication.  So, why?  The skeptical heathen in me would say that once you've removed evidence and reasonable argument, you're left with little more than wishful thinking.  But this comes off as more derogatory and cynical than I intend for it too.  "Wishful Thinking" isn't just the refuge of delusional fools.  It's a significant part of all our lives.  It fuels our dreams and, as the insistence on The Slender Man shows, even our nightmares.  It is a necessary ingredient of any leap of faith, and some leaps are greater than others.  It can lead us astray, but it doesn't necessarily always lead us into error, and this is where our more prudent sides look for proof.  Sometimes we rely on evidence not just as a map of reality, but also as a way of tracking landmarks in our flights of fancy, something to tell us that we might not just be kidding ourselves.  And we all do this.  We all get out ahead of our more sober judgment at times, pursuing the intriguing possibilities.  It may even be an indispensable part of human existence, something we couldn't function without.  It may drive us to make fools of ourselves at times, but before people get too smug in their mockery, they should remember that we all chase our own spaghetti monsters in one form or another.

The cautious, incremental steps of the scientific method are an invaluable aid for keeping us grounded, and keeping us from getting too carried away by these impulses.  But people like Richard Dawkins sometimes come to think of the scientific method as a lens through which you view the world, instead of a tool with which you check your work.  There's always something to be said for dreaming, for speculating, for following a crazy idea just to see where it leads.  It might even lead you to a open clearing of breath-taking truth that you wouldn't have found otherwise.  

Now, Doug, that's a stickman with angst ;)                  

Inception: The Calculus of Dreams

Inception seems to be one of those movies that people either love or hate.  When it came out last summer there were several complaints that I heard lodged against it.  One of the most prevalent ones was that the dreams were not strange and surreal enough, and that the endless complexity of rules laid out in the movie bore no relation to what dreams are really like.  Realism is a strange complaint to make concerning a movie about dreams, since dreams by their very nature are practically the antithesis of realism.  Still, I knew what these people were driving at.  The dreams in Inception do bear little resemblance to those visited upon our nightly slumbers.  However, these people were missing the whole point.  The surrealism lay in the concept of the story, not in its details.  The peculiar charm of Inception is that it takes a systematic and cerebral approach to an emotionally chaotic phenomenon.

The movie borrows from several basic phenomena of dreams to construct its elaborate rules.  It treats these phenomena as if they were precise variables in a complex equation, as things which can be measured and quantified with pinpoint accuracy, which is not actually the way these things work at all.  But the movie precedes as if this is the case.  The idea is absurd in and of itself, and I believe that this is done deliberately.  I'm sure Christopher Nolan has had the same lifetime of dreaming experience that we've all had.  Inception isn't meant to be a realistic portrayal of dreams.  It takes the subject of dreams and builds an abstract framework of intricate systemic design.  Dreams are merely a means to this end.  The following is a consideration of the pieces out of which this framework is constructed.

TIME EXPANSION & COGNITIVE COMPRESSION

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud tells the story of a dream dreamt by a man name Maury.  In the dream Maury was on trial.  The dream was set at some time during the French Revolution, and this Maury was brought before the revolutionary tribunal.  After a lengthy trial, he was found guilty and thrown into prison to await execution.  The date of his execution arrived and he was led out to before the screaming crowd.  He was brought to the execution block, and locked into the guillotine.  When the hissing blade dropped, he awoke just as it hit his neck.  Upon waking he discovered that the headboard had fallen and struck him on the neck, which was what had woken him up.  Apparently, the entire long ordeal of the dream had merely occurred in the few fractions of a second when the headboard struck his neck.

Of course, we've all had similar, if somewhat less extreme experiences.  We've fallen asleep for a few hours and had dreams which seem to cover months or even years.  Mostly this is because events in dreams often occur in a more narrative than real-time fashion.  Just as a movie can cover the distance between March and June simply by taking a few moments to show us a tree flowering into full bloom, so too can our dreams give us the illusion of an epic passage of time.

Inception treats this phenomenon quite literally, however.  The dream infiltrators measure the time expansion with perfect precision.  They time things down to the second on the basis of this expansion.  They account for this expansion by crediting an acceleration of mental functioning.  The deeper the infiltrators descend into the dream-world, level by level, the quicker their minds are able to process information.  Since the dream is being sustained and created by the mind, the accelerated experience of it causes the actual real-world time that it covers to become more and more compressed.  Conceivably this compression could go on, descending down to an infinitesimal level.  At this level, which the characters refer to as "limbo", the mental functioning has been accelerated to the point that an infinite amount of experience can be compressed down to a single moment.

THE INCORPORATION OF EXTERNAL STIMULI

Have you ever fallen asleep with the TV on, and had the audio from the TV weave its way into your dreams?  Have you ever had the alarm clock go off, only to have the noise reinterpreted by your dream?  I know I have.  Maybe you've even heard the joke where the guy says he was dreaming that he ate a giant marshmallow, and then woke up to find that his pillow was gone.  Scientists have even done studies where they've tickled people with feathers or dripped hot wax on them, and then they've recorded how the stimulus showed up in their dreams.  Some have even argued that the entire content of dreams is constructed entirely out of stimulus external to the dream, whether it be a noise outside the window or the gurgling of our own stomach.

Inception takes a rather interesting approach to this phenomenon.  The film makes much use of the idea of "levels", dreams within dreams.  It uses this concept of external stimuli to demonstrate the way the dreams are packaged inside of one another.  When a van flips over on one level, the entire reality of the level below tumbles end over end.  When the van free falls through the air, the level below loses gravity altogether.  In addition to providing some  neat visuals, this also accentuates one of the spacial peculiarities of dreams.  In a dream, your physical body appears to occupy a space which resides inside your mind, which, of course, is  already inside your body to begin with.  As the infiltrators descend level upon level, their bodies are continually being tucked inside dream worlds that exist inside their minds.  It becomes a sort of existential Droste Effect, which again descends down to an infinitesimal level.  So limbo occupies not only an infinite point in time, but in space as well.

THE NESTED PERMUTATIONS OF FALSE AWAKENING

False awakenings are like the evil cousins of lucid dreams.  A lucid dream is where the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming and are then able to take control over the dream.  The lucidity of the lucid dreams lies in the fact that the dreamer seems to be in full possession of their mental faculties, which are normally blunted and limited in dreams.  In a sense, they seem wide awake and yet still dreaming.  If you've had the experience you know how odd it can feel.  Well, a false awakening is sort of the opposite experience.  This is where the dreamer believes they've woken up, often with the same surroundings where they fell asleep reproduced with amazing accuracy, but actually they're still dreaming.  This is usually accompanied by an eerie sense that something is wrong or "off".  Then something disturbing usually happens, and the dream flies out of control again.

Inception uses this phenomenon to construct the concept of dreams within dreams.  It employs it in a backwards manner, as the characters are usually seen descending down into the next level.  However, it should be noted that when this idea is first introduced to us, it is in the form that we're more familiar with.  The characters awake from a dream, which we the audience think is the waking world, only to find that it is just another dream, one level above.   Having the "level" concept demonstrated to us in this fashion, allows us to accept it when it's used backwards later on.  In reality, the phenomenon of false awakening doesn't imply any kind of nesting of dream levels.  The false awakening is just another of a multitude of common dream experiences.  It falls in a sequence of events, rather than demonstrating a layering of levels.  I don't believe it has even been shown that events in the false awakening dream affect the reality of the dream that proceeded it.  But then, how would you know?  Nevertheless, this nesting concept provides an ingenious means to demonstrate the  peculiar spatial architecture of dreams mentioned above.

PERPETUAL EXPERIENCE OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

At one point in Inception, the main character, Cobb, explains that in dreams we create and experience our world at the same time.  This is absolutely true, and its really quite amazing when you think about it.  Dreams seem able to tap into a deep reservoir of creativity and invention that we can only access the merest fraction of while we're awake.  While we might struggle in our waking life to squeeze out the simplest shred of an idea, dreams create with a disposable abandon as though drawing from an endless well of inspiration.  This well, of course, is simply our imagination.  Awake, we keep it in check to various degrees by our intellect, but in dreaming it has free reign.  Like our inner monologue, it flows continuously, but we only seem to tune into it completely in our dreams.  It is as if we climb inside our imagination and then experience it as though it were reality.

Robert Louis Stevenson was said to have gotten his idea for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from a dream.  Coleridge was said to have gotten the idea for Kubla Khan from a dream as well.  There have been countless other cases of people getting ideas for everything from songs to paintings from dreams.  I myself, have gotten the idea for several stories from dreams.  Sometimes a dream seems to provide an inspiration that never would have occurred to you in a million years, but the ideas are there waiting.  They just required a loosening of the intellect and a lowering of inhibitions to bloom into their full form.

In a sense, the story of Inception can be seen as a metaphor for this process.  The title refers to the planting of an idea in someone's mind, a seed in the soil that takes deep root in the subconscious.  Again the level concept is employed to ingenious effect.  The deeper the level of the dream the deeper into the core of the subject's psyche.  Like space and time, the subject's identity becomes more compressed and concentrated as you descend.  A small detail, planted deep enough, expands up through the levels until it reaches the level of waking reality where it can become a fundamental part of the subject's personality.  This implies a model of the mind spatially equivalent to the psychological concept of formative development.  The further you regress in time to a person's earliest experiences, the more fundamental those impressions are to the foundations of the person's personality.  Like the seed planted in Inception, as the core of the person's life experiences grows, the more this foundational impression expands.  While these seeds often grow into weeds in the garden of our life, occasionally they can flower into something beautiful and creative.

WAKING TO THE REAL WORLD

The ending of Inception spawned endless debate.  Was he really awake or still dreaming?  Did the spinning top fall or not?  Unfortunately people were picking up this metaphysical ball and running in the wrong direction with it.  Too often people focus on the issue of "what really happened" in the story's plot, rather than appreciating the meaning behind it.  Inception leaves the story open-ended, not to encourage speculation about the narrative, but rather to encourage the viewer to speculate about the nature of reality itself.  The top is meant to demonstrate the old philosophical notion of whether we can truly determine the difference between reality and an illusion.  The idea is not a new one, but the truly clever thing that the movie accomplishes is to present the conundrum not in words, but in a single image.  This is the final result of the elaborate equation.  Everything in the movie is set up to converge on that single image.  The movie is like a complicated chess problem with all the pieces put perfectly in place for this final checkmate.

The levels concept introduces the possibility that there might be another level above what the characters consider reality.  Cobb's wife Mal introduces the enigma of what we require to accept something as reality.  The concept of inception itself introduces the idea of the mind's capacity for self-deception.  The concept of sub-conscious projections introduces the dilemma of being together with the ones we love or alone with only our idea of them.  The limbo concept introduces a dream reality that  in its infinitesimal compression can transcend space and time and the consequences of the waking world.  And finally we have the totem, the spinning top, representing an anchor to solid, physical reality, ambiguously caught between spinning and falling, caught between the world we live in and the world we dream of.  It begs the question of what really matters, what really makes the difference between the two? 

Predictive Dreaming

The other day I wrote a post about a shared dream experience I had when I was a kid.  In the comments for the post, the subject came up of another familiar yet mysterious type of dream, dreams of future events.  As I pointed out then, I've had a few minor brushes with this.  I've never had a dream which directly featured an event exactly as it was going to happen, but I have had a few times where a dream was oddly related to a subsequent event in a way that seems to go beyond simple coincidence.  Once I dreamt that I was trying to fix a gas fireplace in my bedroom, only to wake up and discover the next day that my gas furnace wasn't working.  Another time I dreamt that I was in a crumbling, abandoned house trying to retrieve one of my cats that had fallen through a hole in the floor, only the wake up and discover that this same cat had run away again (don't worry; he came back.)  I had a few other instances as well that don't come to mind at the moment.

Now, I think I might have a possible, and I stress the word possible, explanation for this.  If I can't explain how two people can share a dream, an imaginary event supposedly taking place solely in one of the dreamer's minds, then I can hardly hope to reach any solid conclusions regarding predictive dreaming.  However, I tend to be of the opinion that things have reasonable, scientific explanations, elusive though those explanations may sometimes be.  Just because I lack a reasonable explanation for shared dreaming, doesn't mean I'm completely ready to throw in the towel of logic and embrace the world of black magic and wizardly incantations quite yet.

To begin with, we need to visualize the conscious mind's relation to the sub-conscious mind.   First, imagine your memory is a cramped room crammed full of filing cabinets.  The cabinets are stuffed to over flowing with files.  They're spilling out of the drawers onto the floor.  They're piled up onto of the cabinets for lack of space, wedged in tight against the ceiling.  It's a complete pandemonium.  In the middle of the room is the little desk of the over-worked filing clerk.  He's surrounded by mountains of files on all sides.  They tower over him and barely provide room for him to fit in his own filing room.  This clerk is your conscious mind.  Although he is surrounded by these towering archives, he only has room on his little desk for three or four files at a time.  If he wants to look at a different file, he has to put one of the ones on his desk back and retrieve another.  His access to the files is limited to the finite space he has to work with.  The subconscious mind has no such limitations.  It has access to the entire archive at all times.  You might say it's the room and the cabinets themselves.  Except, in this case the files are no mere pieces of paper.  They are a living, breathing thing, organizing and cross-referencing themselves behind the clerk's back.  

Now, that's inside the mind.  When it comes to looking out and perceiving the world and processing new sensory data coming in, the subconscious again has the advantage.  Imagine you're out in the dark at night and you have a flashlight with you.  Your field of vision is limited to what can be illuminated in the narrow beam of the flashlight.  It's useful to light your way, but it hardly provides you with a complete picture of the world around you.  This flashlight is once again our friend the conscious mind.  We carry this flashlight with us constantly, even on the brightest, sunniest day.  It is the focus of our attention.  Like the desk of our file clerk, this focus is extremely limited, and the more intense the focus, the more limited it's range.  Returning to our flashlight analogy, notice how the beam intensifies and yet narrows at the same time as we approach an object.  This how our attention works.  

Our subconscious, on the other hand, is like a cat with night vision.  It sees everything, all the time.  Even the most insignificant piece of sensory information that crosses our path gets received, processed, and filed.  This leads us right back to our filing clerk.  Every minute of every day, new files arrive in the filing room.  Most of it comes from beyond the beam of our flashlight, so it wasn't noticed on the way in.  And the filing clerk, he's far too busy to sort through all this junk, so it just ends up getting stuffed into a cabinet.  That's when that behind the scenes, organic process of cross-referencing and automatic filing sets in without the clerk's knowledge.  

An interesting thing happens when we dream.  It's like the filing clerk has fallen asleep, dozing at his desk with his grey nose hairs fluttering as he snores, and we have an open run at the files.  We have a broader, more liberal access, but it's also a very haphazard and unstructured access because we don't have the clerk to sort through it all for us.  We just start tossing out files left and right, without rhyme or reason.  We put two files together because they both happen to be in red folders, or they both have pizza stains on them, or they both have three Q's on the first page.  In short, we make a complete mess.  In making this mess though, we're liable to stumble across connections that the file clerk might never have noticed.

An experiment was conducted once upon a time, where the subjects were shown composite pictures that featured dozens of different random elements.  They were shown these pictures very briefly, then they were asked to write down what elements they remembered from the pictures.  Then, after they had slept that night, they were asked to write down their dreams.  In almost all cases, their dreams featured elements from the composite picture that they had not written down.  In other words, they dreamt of elements that escaped the beam of the flashlight and the attention of the file clerk, but the information had been processed and stored nevertheless.  

This is where predictive dreaming comes in.  I think, perhaps, that somewhere in this incalculable pile of processed information lies clues to forth-coming events that the conscious mind has failed to pick up on.  If a dream forewarns of this event, and then it happens, the result seems miraculous.  But the only thing miraculous happening here is the conscious mind's failure to pay attention.  Consider this, let's say that you notice, consciously notice, that your hot water heater is leaking a tiny amount of water from it.  You take this as a sign of the water heater's impending failure, and when the tank finally does give out, you're hardly impressed by your psychic prognostication.  Simple logic warned you.  But what if you didn't consciously notice the leak?  You were in the basement.  The leak was in your field of vision, but the beam of your flashlight never honed in on it.  The information still gets processed, and as the experiment above shows, it's even more likely to show up in a dream precisely because it wasn't consciously noticed.  The results could certainly leave anyone mystified and thinking that they had had a genuine premonition.

This is not to say that your subconscious mind is a secret Maytag repairman, diagnosing bad furnaces and worn-out water heaters.  In the case of my furnace dream, it would have been enough for my subconscious to pick up on the fact that something was subtly off or different in the operation of the appliance.  In the case of my cat, he probably slipped out the door without my consciously taking note of it, but I did see him briefly zip by.  He is pretty damn fast, after all.  A fleeting look on a friend's face that should have warned you they weren't quite telling you the truth if you had noticed it, a neighbor's door standing open when it should have been closed passing through your peripheral field of vision as you drive by, a subtle and imperceptible difference in the amount of pressure you need to apply to your brakes, these are the things that premonitions are made of.  Your subconscious might not know what to make of these things.  In fact, your subconscious doesn't make anything out of anything at all.  That kind of deduction is a job for your conscious mind.  Your subconscious just tags, processes, and stores the information.  It does conduct the organic cross-referencing process I mentioned, but it's up to the dreaming mind to stumble across these loose connections.

So that's my two cents on the subject, at least.  As I started out by saying, my own experience with predictive dreaming is limited to dreams of startling coincidence and association.  Maybe my idea breaks down when considering dreams where someone actually sees and experience the event exactly as it's going to happen.  I don't know.  This is just one humble blogger's attempt to tackle the problem.  My resources are limited, and my references are sketchy.  I know I can sleep soundly on my explanation.  Good night.  Sweet dreams.                            

About a Dream

For those of you who don't know, I write another blog called The Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep.  It's somewhere between a dream journal, and a collection of short stories.  Basically, I use ideas that I get from my dreams as a creative starting point for short works of fiction, and I build from there; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.  It all depends.  Check it out, if you want.  Apparently my subconscious has some wild theories if its own.  

I bring this up, not just as a shameless attempt at cross-promotion, but because today's post is about a dream I once had when I was a kid.  I'm writing about it here because there's more to the story than just the dream itself, as you'll see.  So, it's kind of like I'm guest blogging on my own blog.  It feels kind of weird, but that might have something to do with the painkillers that the dentist has me on.  If I was over on the other blog, I guess I would call this post "Footprints in the Snow", but I'm not, so I won't.  You might walk away from this story thinking I'm a little out of my mind, but I guess I'll have to take that risk.  Anyhow, without further pointless rambling, I'll turn the floor over to my guest blogger, myself, who also just happens to be me: 

I had this dream when I was about 12 years old.  There was this blonde girl that I liked at school.  In the dream, she was my girlfriend and we were walking through the halls of the school, holding hands, which is probably as exciting as my imagination got at that age.  We passed everyone I knew in the halls, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were suitably impressed.  I had a big beaming smile on my face.  Everything was wonderful.  I couldn't have been happier...

...and then I woke up.

Except...I hadn't really woken up.  I was still dreaming.  I just dreamt that I woke up.  Nevertheless, I was quite disappointed to learn that my little stroll through the school hall with the blonde girl hadn't been real.  I refused to accept it.  I got out of bed and ran out of the house.  It was a sunny day outside; one of those days in late winter, early spring, where the snow had melted back to little patches on the grass.  I went to the spot where the school had been in my dream.  There was nothing but an open field there now.  I stared at it, stunned and defeated, shaking my head.  But then I noticed something.  In a big patch of snow in the middle of the field, I saw two sets of footprints crossing the length of it.  It was real.  We had walked hand in hand on this very spot.  The school had faded away, but the traces of our feet remained in the snow.

I was so excited, that I had to tell someone.  I ran back towards home, and I went to the next door neighbor's house where this girl who I was friends with lived.  I knocked at the door, and when she answered, I asked her to come outside so that I could show her something.  She had the same melting patches of snow in her backyard that were everywhere else.  I pointed out a big tree that was next to one of the snow patches, and I told her that we had to sit down beside it and go to sleep.  She looked at me a little strangely, but she agreed.  Now, I'll remind you that this was all still a dream at this point, but inside this dream we sat down under the tree and "fell asleep" in a matter of seconds and we dreamt that we were running across the snow patch.  When we reached the edge of it, I yelled "WAKE UP!", and there we were under the tree again.  We got to our feet, and I showed her the footprints in the snow that we had made in our dream.  Then, in a voice that somehow didn't quite seem to be my own, I turned to her and said, "See, dreams are real."

The moment I said that, everything changed.  We weren't in the backyard anymore.  We were down at the town square, standing under the clock tower on the courthouse.  It was just getting dark out.  I saw the blonde girl in the shadows of some trees across the park.  I tried to call out to her, but it suddenly seemed like everything was falling apart and spinning out of control.  I realized that this was all just another dream, and I could feel it slipping away.  The clock on the courthouse began to spin faster and faster, and it kept chiming the hour over and over until I finally woke up for real, and realized that it was my alarm going off.

I thought about this dream all day at school.  I couldn't get it out of my head.  It had felt more real than any dream I had ever had.  I passed the day in a kind of dazed preoccupation.  After school I ran into the neighbor girl.  I was itching to tell somebody about this weird dream that I had had.  I started telling her about it, but when I got to the part where I had knocked on her door, she had the strangest look on her face.  She told me that she had had the exact same dream, only it had been from her own perspective.  She told me about how I had come to the door.  She told me about falling asleep under the tree.  She told me about my strange voice when I said, "See, dreams are real."  She told me about the clock tower, and how she had turned around and I was gone.  She knew everything.

I wasn't sure what to make of this.  Neither was she.  We tried for months after that to repeat the experience.  Every time we saw each other, we asked about about the dreams the other had had, but they were never the same.  Eventually we gave up hope on the whole thing. Clearly, it was a one time thing, never to be repeated. 

I have no explanation to offer for this, no theories.  I leave it to you all to figure it out.  Was it just the power of suggestion?  Did I just imagine the whole thing?  Was there some sort of psychic phenomenon at work?  Am I still dreaming?  Maybe you just think I'm completely full of it, and I just made it all up.  I can certainly understand that viewpoint, and you're free to think that, but I promise you that it's completely true.  I don't understand it at all, but it did happen.  So...what do you think?

More on Vanilla Sky

I got to thinking about the post that I wrote about Vanilla Sky the other day, and I realized that I wanted to add a few points.  In particular, I want to discuss the issue of David's guilt as well as the meaning of the dream sequence that opens the film.  (Please note: I wrote the original post under the assumption that I was addressing people who hadn't seen the film.  I provided a brief synopsis of the plot points I would be dealing with.  This post goes into more detail, and I guess it's written more for people who have seen the film.  Trying to cover all the plot points I deal with here would be nearly impossible and would definitely make a ridiculously long post even longer.)  Anyway:   

DAVID'S GUILT OVER JULIE'S SUICIDE

                                                                     

As an anticipation of possible objections, I think that maybe I need to establish more definite proof of David's guilt since my concept of David's dream as a wish fulfillment rests almost entirely on this point.  The movie never explicitly confirms this fact.  McCabe's statement that David "treated Julie carelessly" is the only real acknowledgement that David might have anything to feel guilty about.  David responds to this with just a simple nod.  Although he discusses his life and his feelings in great detail with McCabe, he never directly expresses any real remorse or responsibility over what happened to Julie.  He's strangely silent on the subject.  A girl commits suicide with him in the car because she's in love with him and he has nothing to say about this?  

Of course, David's silence in and of itself proves nothing; quite the contrary.  However, there are a few subtle moments that provide a clue to his feelings.  One of these moments occurs the morning of the accident.  Julie's statement that he's never there for his friends until they've given up on him, causes him to hesitate and finally to agree to get into the car with her.  This shows that he's not completely cold to the way he's treated her, even though, to other people, he's referred to her as a "stalker" and made light of their relationship.  He projects a certain image of himself and his emotions that seems to cover up his deeper feelings.  We'll return to this point below.

Another, and more significant clue to his guilt occurs during his second dream sequence where he meets up with Sophia in the park.  Notice the look on his face when Sophia reminds him of the party and repeats the line about "the saddest girl to ever hold a martini."  The memory that this all brings back clearly disturbs him.  Note as well that it's this memory of Julie that disrupts his happy dream of Sophia.  This theme is repeated in a broader and more expanded way in his third dream, his Lucid Dream experience with Life Extension.  Finally, note that he repeats this dialogue about the martini to Sophia at the dance club as if he's oblivious to the fact that it might be inappropriate given the circumstances of what's happened.  Yet, we've seen in the park dream that the memory of this conversation does disturb him.  Again we have a pattern of him making light of something to mask his inner feelings.

His conversation with Brian outside the dance club provides a third clue.  He confronts Brian about the fact that he told Julie that David referred to her as his "fuck buddy."  This is a defensive reaction.  He's trying to shift some of the blame for what happened to Julie to Brian, especially since he knows it was Brian who actually referred to her that way.  In a way he's trying to discuss his guilt with Brian at that moment, but it ends up coming out all wrong.  One of the reasons throughout the film that he doesn't talk about the way he feels about what happened to Julie is that he hasn't quite come to terms with it.  The story itself is really the process of him coming to terms with it.  As far as Brian, notice that in the Lucid dream he's cast in the role of a betrayer, in league with "The Board".  This reflects the guilt David tried to project onto him outside the dance club.  It's yet another piece of wish-fulfillment from the Lucid dream.  If he can prove that Brian is a back-stabber, then he can absolve himself of his guilt over Julie's death.

Now this all may seem like rather thin evidence, but we're dealing with a story where a man is in denial about his own guilt.  So of course it's not really going to be acknowledged openly.  I think the evidence above is compelling enough to draw the conclusion that he does feel guilty.  The whole narrative of the Lucid dream involves him trying to recover the life that he lost because of the accident...Sophia, his face, ect.  He just didn't fully consider what an integral part Julie was of that equation.  He lost something else because of her death; something he hadn't come to terms with; something that might be impossible to recover. 

The simplest way to look at it would be this: David is given a virtual world where he can have anything and any life he imagines.  Yet it all gets ruined as though he were being punished for his sins, as though Karma had returned in the form of Julie Gianni to haunt him.  It all seems to have a certain poetic justice about it.  But then you have to ask yourself: In David's mind...in David's dream...who's the one doing the punishing?  And why?

However, to return to the point of my previous post, the object of the dream is not punishment but wish-fulfillment.  Punishment is more like...a side effect.  The emotional conflicts of the mind lead to conflicts between our different wishes and desires and this in turn manifests itself as dis-harmony and discord in the dream state.  Part of David wants his happy life with Sophia, but buried beneath that, another part of him wants to engineer a scenario where he doesn't have to feel bad about Julie's death.  Part of him wants to take it all back and make it right again, but it can't be undone.  He wants to have his cake but he also wants to be forgiven for preferring it over another cake that drove itself off a bridge.

                                                                      DAVID'S FIRST DREAM

The film opens with a strange but simple dream sequence.  David "wakes up" in the morning, and leaves his apartment and finds that the streets of New York are completely deserted.  He stops his car in the middle of the empty street in Times Square.  He takes off running as he's bombarded with flashing advertisements from the billboards.  Finally, he ends up spinning in the middle of the square with arms outstretched as he lets out a cry of either terror or triumph, and then with a gasp he awakes.  This opening scene and its relation to the rest of the story has perplexed me for quite some time, but I think I have an idea about what it means. 

In one sense, the nature of the dream itself implies that the city belongs to him, that it's all there for him.  Imagine the self-absorption and self-importance involved in the dream of being the only man in all of New York City.  All of the towering buildings are there just for him.  All of the enticing ads are for his eyes alone to see.  Again, it's a wish-fulfillment, and an incredibly ego-driven one.

And yet, it's a double edged sword.  With this feeling of power and importance comes a terrifying feeling of loneliness and isolation.  The piercing cry he lets out at the end of the dream captures this dichotomy perfectly.  On the one hand, it's an expression of power.  His voice echoes through the empty silent streets.  It's the sort of spontaneous impulse that makes someone yell at the top of their lungs when they look out over the vast expanse of The Grand Canyon.  On the other hand, it's an expression of terrifying loneliness.  It's an attempt to make contact.  It's a wordless way of crying out, "Does anyone out there hear me?"  The ambiguousness of this cry captures both sides of the dream.

I think this dream tells a lot about where David is in his life as the story opens.  It also helps to establish a running theme that will develop through-out the movie, the idea that our desires come with a psychological price, that all our wishes and fantasies have another side to them.  At David's birthday party Brian makes his "Sweet & Sour" speech.  By the end of the film, David has learned this lesson for himself.  He has come to see that having a perfect life isn't as simple as it might seem.  Our sorrows and disappointments are just as essential to the full experience of life as our successes and our joys and accomplishments.  Consequences...the little things...there's nothing bigger.  

(Final note: I noticed during a recent viewing of this movie that the car he drives in this opening dream sequence is different from the Mustang he drives in the real-life scene that follows.  If anyone has any guesses about the significance of this, or even knows what kind of car that was in the dream, feel free to leave a comment below.)

Vanilla Sky: An Exploration of Wish-Fulfillment

In his groundbreaking work The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud put forward the idea that "Every dream represents the fulfillment of a wish."  For many dreams, this idea seems rather self-evident.  However, it's Freud's assertion that all dreams represent the fulfillment of a wish that many people have a hard time grasping.  They have trouble accepting that even their nightmares are manifestations of their deepest desires.  On the surface the idea appears contradictory and the implications seems appalling, but the mind is far more complicated than they imagine.

The idea is simple enough, if you think about it.  A dream is an experience created by you mind.  Every situation, every event, every detail no matter how small is deliberately orchestrated.  There is nothing accidental.  There is nothing that happens to you in a dream that runs contrary to your will, no matter how much it might appear that way.  You might not be aware or feel a conscious connection to the forces creating and controlling your dreams.  Nevertheless, it is your mind at work behind it all.  It's your mind making it all happen.  Deep down there's some part of you that wants it to happen, that needs it to happen, even if the conscious experience of it is one of overwhelming terror.  

But why would your own mind deliberately put you through a terrifying ordeal like that?  How could a wish-fulfillment fantasy turn into such a twisted and unpleasant experience?  The film Vanilla Sky provides an excellent glimpse of this process at work.  (Spoilers to follow, of course.)

The story of the film follows the emotional journey of David Ames, a young heir to a publishing empire.  He has lived a life of excess and entitlement.  He has money.  He has no trouble picking up women.  Anything he wants, he gets without effort.  Disappointment, disillusionment, and regret are things he's seldom had to deal with in his life.  Then one day it all falls apart.  A girl named Julie that he's had a casual relationship with grows angry over his callous attitude and becomes jealous of a new girl that he's interested in named Sophia.  She drives off a bridge and commits suicide with him in the car.  He wakes up from a coma scarred and disfigured.  Sophia shies away from him.  He begins to see his nice comfortable life slipping away.  All of the things that once came easy to him are now just beyond his reach.  

(At this point in the story, things take a surreal turn.  However, my point would be better served if I followed the events in a chronological rather than narrative order.)  

Faced, for the first time in his life, with the crushing consequences of something he cannot change, David commits suicide.  Before doing so, he signs a contract with a company called Life Extension to have his body placed in cryogenic stasis upon his death.  He purchases a deluxe package from them called "The Lucid Dream."  As the name suggested, this involves placing David's mind in a dream state while his body is frozen and preserved.  This dream is "spliced" into a specifically chosen moment in David's life.  As far as he knows, his life is simply continuing on from that moment.  He has no memory of taking his own life or any other real-world events that happened after the splice.  

Now here is where we get into the issue of dreams.  The point of the Lucid Dream option is the same as the point of all dreams under Freud's theory.  It is sold to David as a limitless experience of fantasy and wish-fulfillment.  Yet, something goes wrong.  The dream turns into a nightmare.  Oh, it all begins well enough.  Sophia no longer pulls away, but instead she accepts him and falls in love with him.  The doctors are able to fix his disfigured face.  His life seems to be getting back on track.  But then things take a turn.  He "wakes up" to find Julie in bed with him, claiming to be Sophia.  Things begin to spin out of control.  Everyone else recognizes Julie as Sophia.  He has paranoid suspicions that he's the victim of some sort of conspiracy.  Sophia and Julie become interchangeable to the point that it finally leads him to a breakdown that drives him to murder Sophia.  In prison a psychologist leads him to remember his contract with Life Extension and the realization that he's in a dream state.

So did the people at Life Extension sell him a faulty product?  Was there a glitch in the Lucid Dream option?  No.  The Lucid Dream delivered exactly what it was supposed to.  David's dream was a wish-fulfillment, just as Freud insisted.  The problem is that there are often wishes in the mind that run counter to one another, causing a traffic jam of impossibility that makes the sub-conscious incapable of projecting a pleasant scenario.  David still had repressed guilt over his involvement in Julie's death.  Part of him wished that he had loved Julie.  Part of him wished that he had been in a deeper relationship with her, that he could have been capable of caring more about her, and that he could have spared her life.  Part of him didn't feel like he deserved this happy life with Sophia and he wished that he could be in a situation that he felt less guilt and regret over.  In the experience of the Lucid Dream his mind expressed these wishes by grafting Julie onto his projection of Sophia.  Naturally, this conflicted with his more conscious wish to have a happy life with Sophia.  This ambivalence is also represented in his worries over whether his re-constructive surgery is real and lasting.

The story of David Ames demonstrates the process of wish-fulfillment by exhibiting it in stark relief.  He begins with a nearly perfect life.  It's a fairly straight-forward fantasy.  But then guilt, regret, and catastrophe disrupt this fantasy as they disrupt all of our fantasies and dreams.  It's not a simple thing, getting what we want.  Only a perfect and unblemished soul could have perfect and unblemished dreams.  For the rest of us, our fears and worries, our doubts and inadequacies shade even our most ambitious desires with touches of beautiful melancholy.  Occasionally, the experience can even take a horrifying turn.  We can only hope that, like David Ames, we can reconcile this turbulence and find peace under these Monet-like skies.