oh dreams.. you are fascinating!!

It was an afternoon, a couple of weeks before I guess. After taking lunch, I was sitting on the cot. My laptop was placed on the cot with a song playing in windows media player. I could not recognize the song as I was hearing it for the first time. It started with a mild prelude, sort of a song in a melancholic situation. Suddenly there was a sound in between. What is that…? It’s like the sound of a vehicle horn and what’s the need for that in this song. I wondered. In another few seconds, I heard something falling down on the floor. I woke up suddenly and realized that I was in dream. The song I listened to and the horn sound I heard were in fact in the dream which I had a few minutes before during the nap. I saw my laptop screen and it was not even turned on at that time. 

Later after a few days, I heard the same song again while I was travelling in a town bus. It was from the tamil film ‘Paradesi’. Oh.. wait.. where is the horn sound? It was missing now. I wondered how. I mean, how the horn sound came into the dream. I still have no clue about how that sound came into my dream.

Yesterday afternoon, I had this dream that a granny was taking food in my house. I saw her eating fish curry with brinjal. She is a relative to my family, of the same age as my grandmother and used to visit my house often. I saw also in the dream the same day where a man of late 30s, may be diplomat, was walking in the corridor to meet his superior officer. He had a file in his hand and while walking, he drops a book by mistake. A young man takes it and opens it. In the first page there was written something and the handwriting was quite familiar to me. And that’s the end of the dream. I couldn’t remember whether these two incidents occurred in the same dream or in different but both happened while I was sleeping yesterday noon.

Not only these two incidents, there are quite a number of dreams which threw me a lot of questions. The basic questions are ‘how’ and ‘why’. In fact dream is one thing that fascinates me like anything. I am now obsessed with them for a few months to an extent that I started making a log of my own dreams in a separate notebook.

What is a dream?

 

Ok. What is a dream, by the way? One greatest advantage of internet is that it serves as a source of information for almost anything and everything. My obsession and curiosity made me spent considerable amount of time in searching over the internet for stuffs related to dreams. The more I read, the more I am interested in dreams.

Researchers define dream as a picture in your head that appears while sleeping, which may or may not be related to the events of our life. It can include anything ranging from images, thoughts, emotions, etc. It may be very very vague, or extraordinarily vivid, or scary enough to take away the rest of your sleep, or pleasant enough to make you smile for next couple of days. More importantly it may or may not be meaningful. This is the most interesting aspect and beauty of dreams. 

Dream researchers claim that sometimes our dreams have our own life incidents, like a replay, with certain unfamiliar events mixed up. Our dreams are a result of our actions and thoughts throughout the day which we incorporate them. Why we see them in our dreams is still a mystery to the researchers. Some say that they really do have a purpose while some others say that they don’t have sense at all. That’s the beauty of dreams. 

Why did I dream of the granny?

As told already that dreams are a reflection of our actions, I could relate some of my dreams (which I remember) very well with the events associated with my life. I deduced to some extent the reasons for the occurrences narrated above. When I slept yesterday, I was reading a novel. It is a memoir of an intelligence officer. I have started reading it only a few days before. It was so much interesting and impressive the way the author described his office, the corridors, and all. The corridor I saw in my dream was more or less same as how I imagined the office when reading the memoir. That could be the reason why I saw a man walking with a file in his hands. The booked he dropped resembled another book I had taken from district library a few weeks before.

The granny visited my house my a few days before. On that day my mother prepared fish and brinjal for lunch. She took lunch in our house and appreciated my mother for its deliciousness! That may have a reason how she jumped into my dream. A coincidence was that, my mother again made fish on the day I had this dream. 

That makes perfect sense. At the same time, they sometimes do not have any meaning at all, like the song and horn sound. In the above narrated incidents, the actions took place in my dream are those happened earlier in my life. There are also occurrences of dreams where the actions haven’t happened really but you may either want it or don’t want to happen in your life.

I used to go to an ice cream parlor with two of my best buddies while I was doing my post graduation. Once while chitchatting in the parlor, my friend told that what I will do if my project guide visits the shop now. Actually I was eluding from my professor at that time due to delay in the task I needed to accomplish. So she made such a statement just funnily. And that night I had the dream of sitting in the same ice cream shop with the same friends and suddenly there is a voice “Ashik... What a surprise!” A very friendly and familiar voice and Yes it’s my project guide. I was shocked. And that’s the end of the dream.

Simply saying, dream is all about our day to day actions and thoughts. The question of how a particular event is reflected in our dream is answered. The ‘why’ is still unanswered and the purpose still remains a mystery.

Exploring Lynchian Dream - an explanation for Mulholland Dr.

Spoiler Alert: This post is full of spoilers!! Do not read further if you have not seen the movie yet.

Eerie visuals and music, violence, bizarre characterizations, multiple identities, dream imagery are some common elements one can often find in the movies directed by David Lynch. He is well known for movies which often mystify the audiences. This is the fascinating aspect of the director who succeeds in presenting a fairly simple plot in his own unique style of filmmaking. 

One of the best works of Lynch is Mulholland drive, a surrealistic, neo-noir psychological thriller about a failed actress. The movie stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Thoreaux in lead roles.

What is the plot about?

Diane Selwyn, after winning a dance contest shifts to LA from Canada, aspiring to be a successful movie star one day.  Her aunt Ruth had died leaving her a sum of $50000. Later, she befriends actress Camilla Rhodes on the set of movie Sylvia North Story which she had a small role. There starts a steamy, sexual affair between the two. Diane gets deeply attached to Camilla, but not the latter, who wants to break her affair with Diane because of her newly found affair with director Adam Kesher. So she invites Diane to the party hosted by Adam where he announces his plan to marry Camilla. Enraged by this, Diane hires a hitman to kill her lover.

Afterwards, in her apartment, Diane before going to bed thinks of her past, and goes to deep sleep and starts dreaming, which we see for the first two hours in the movie. Upon waking up, she gets haunted by the images of Camilla, and there she hears the door knocking down by someone, probably the police. Out of guilt, and unwilling to get caught, she shoots herself to death.

Exploring Lynchian dream

 

What we see in the dream are just unfulfilled and unaccomplished things Diane wanted to achieve. In her own dream she enters a fantasy world to see things as how she wanted to be. 

• Though she hired an assassin to kill Camilla, she wanted her not be murdered. So in the dream, Camilla escapes from the gunmen in the limo. Camilla is in fact Rita in the dream.
• The dream counterpart Betty is seen as a happy, charming and well talented which is difficult for Diane.
• She always wanted to be together with Camilla except that it didn’t happen. So in the dream, Betty and Rita spend their time together most of the time.

Diane - Dream vs Real

• The gunman hired to eliminate Camilla is seen in her dream as inefficient so that Diane hopes at least in her dream he does not carry out the job properly which she hired him for.
• When she is talking to the assassin, she sees the waitress’ name to be Betty which becomes her name in dream
• The $50000 she pays the assassin becomes the money in Rita’s purse.
• Almost all good acting roles were given to Camilla leaving Diane nothing, which makes her to visualize that the roles given to her were because of some external force, say the mobsters. In reality, there are no mobsters.
• Right from the beginning, Diane hates Kesher because she sees him as the reason for her breakup. So she wanted to give Adam a tough day, some sort of punishment in the form his wife’s affair with a pool boy.
• Diane has never performed well in her career. So she incorporates that irrespective of Betty’s well performed audition, she is refused the role because of the conspiracies of mobsters.
• Diane tells the assassin showing Camilla’s photo “This is the girl”, which becomes the words of mobsters insisting Adam to tell in the dream.
• Adam’s mother becomes the old lady running Betty’s mansion. When Betty first meets her, she tells “Call me Coco as everyone does”, just like she tells when Diane is introduced at the party.
• The cowboy who threatens Adam and the mob in the dream were guests at the party hosted by Adam. The limo which we see Rita is sitting inside is the same one in which Diane arrives to the party.
• A red lampshade and an ashtray are shown placed at the table in the beginning, moments before Betty arrives to LA in her dream. The same is shown again when Camilla calls Diane for party.
• The dead body that two girls saw in the dream is Diane’s guilt which will lead her to death, like seeing one’s own dead body in his/her apartment.

Red Lampshade, Telephone and Ashtray shown in dream

Red Lampshade shown in real when Diane answers Camilla's phone call

 In this way, Diane incorporated the events, persons and places into her fantasy.

Back to reality again…

How long one can dream? It has to end, right? It ends as soon as the duo returns from Club Silencio.

Like the man on stage repeatedly tells the audience that everything you see here is just an illusion, we are also revealed that nothing is real though it appears to be. What we have seen so far are just imaginations of Diane, the unsuccessful blonde.

The charming Betty disappeared just like that. Now Diane is all alone to face reality. She wakes up when her ex-roommate pays a visit to collect her remaining. When leaving she tells Diane that there were two detectives came by, looking for her. The remaining events of the movie are what mentioned already in the outline, shown as flashbacks. At last, Diane’s pathetic life ends when she shoots herself to death, to escape from haunting and horrifying past. 

Most people feel that the movie is a disturbing, haunting and messy that it is quite difficult to understand. But paying close attention and if necessary, a re-watch with reading explanations like this will make it clear. There are also many in-depth analyses available in the internet, and also the director’s own clues are available in DVD commentatory. I hope the above points are sufficient to untie Lynch’s knots.