I have to confess to have laughed out loud with fits of ironic laughter at some of the press releases being banded around the internet in response to the recent Hollywood blockbuster film Inception. A film which I saw this week and must say I loved it. Not only the concept – a bit like the Matrix on acid – but the effects was marvellous, the soundtrack is high-voltage and it has a cast that I really liked. The film is about dreams…
Many of us have had those common dreams, haven’t we? Where we have been trying to run away from something and out legs would not work, yet our mind was kind of floating along with it… Or many boys have that recurring dream of somehow feeling naked at school in front of other people… And many of us may have had those psychedellic types of dream, where the brain really made some unusual connections…
That can sometimes be as much as we know or regard about our dreams.
In this film then, we are given the opportunity to look deeper (literally) into the everyday phenomenon of dreaming and the premise that we have deeper levels of mind that can be reached within our dreams.
Today, in real-life, away from the glitz and glamour of the giant screen, huge advances in neuroscience research by a wide range of pioneers across a wide variety of universities have led to a many new insights regarding the liaisons among dreaming, cognition, and the brain.
This research requires laboratory environments and the use of incredibly high-tec equipment and use of technology, as you’d expect… So it was wonderful to see this film allowing the viewer to appreciate that truly remarkable observations about dreams can be made in regular life by regular folk, by simply reflecting upon the kinds of things that occur regularly in our own dreams, the places where we spend approximately 30% of our lives.
So as an example, the film demonstrates in dramatic fashion that our dream environments, which are composed of buildings, natural scenes, or fantastical landscapes etc, are all created by our brain, somehow. Some of these creations are as awe-inspiring as a George Lucas sci-fi film or as dramatic as a Shakespeare tragedy.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film, Cobb, says that in our dreams, we do not consider such landscapes and other creations to actually be generated by ourselves, though of course both the dream setting and the image of ourselves within the setting are fabricated by the very same brain. Other aspects of the dream world, such as decisions, preferences, and choices can also be construed as ‘self-generated.’ Aspects of these self-generated processes resemble those of waking life: Deciding which pathway to walk along when navigating a journey is a similar process and choice in a dream or in waking life.
The film also allows one to appreciate that many aspects of dreams can be irrational.
For example, I once dreamt that I was playing football with my friends for a first division club, only to moments later be sat in an exam hall at school listening to the vigilator giving orders in a foreign language that made me panic because i did not understand. Plus there were TV screens on the walls. I just got my head down and focused on writing the exam.
*Breathes cathartic sigh of relief and carries on*
Such random series of events do not happen in reality, mainly because sensory inputs from ‘the real world’ constrain the creations of the mind. The mind is not a passive entity, but a creative one, much like a film producer. According to one piece of dream research I have read, we fail to detect the random series of events and other absurdities that occur in our dreams because the higher-level, rational centers of the brain (such as prefrontal cortex) are less activated when dreaming than when being awake. So we do not rationalise about what is going on. We just carry on with it and all its quirks…
At the same time, many aspects of the dream do stick to reality. For example, in my afore mentioned ream, we all wore football boots and the same colour kit… The wall mounted TVs were all correct in detail and the walls of the exam hall were the same colour as my school sports hall.
In the film Inception, it shows that, upon experiencing physical harm in a dream, we experience pain, even though there is no real physical cause of the pain. Such an observation can be readily made in our dreams.
And of course, we never consciously rationalise about how we ended up being in that place in the first place… In some weird and wonderful dreamscape that we are sat in, we never stop and think… “Hang on a minute, how did I get here?” Which is mentioned in several scenes in the film…
Overall I loved the film, mainly for the sheer bloody-mindedness of it all…
And as for all these hypnotherapists jumping on the bandwagon just because it often refers to the sunconscious mind… Pah!
Heck, at least I jumped on the bandwagon and talked about dreaming and am not espousing notions that I can do the same things as the film using hypnosis… Instead of highly complex chemical sedation and wired-up technology as is used in the film…Hahahaha… You have got to look out for some of that stuff…
Have a great weekend.
