Over the last couple of nights, I've watched the first two episodes of the two-season Falling Water, a large number of onetime USA Network shows being available for free on Amazon Prime. Despite a good cast and some visual flair, it's mostly boring pretentious nonsense. But it did get me thinking on my own.
The show is about...well, the fact that I still don't know how to finish that sentence is a big part of the problem. But there's a thread about sleep experiments and a lot of philosophizing about how we could all be connected through dreams.
The writers―like most people, I think―misunderstand what makes dreams interesting. Dreams are weird, yes. But there's no effort to make them weird. They're not scripted to take you really far out. On the contrary, they're almost always skeletal. Their interest comes from their careless minimalism.
A few weeks ago I dreamed that I was in this big dark theatre. Afterwards I was riding on some open-air streetcar through the countryside. How did I get from the theatre to the streetcar running on tracks where there is no street? I have no idea. My brain skipped over that segue.
The odd things you remember from having to get up and pee.
2 comments:
The first example I thought of when you mentioned dreams and sleep experiments was the movie Inception. The difference being, I guess, that Inception was a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. I'm assuming here that any open ended television show is likely to have elements that are both disjointed and disappointing - except in rare cases. Then we run into the habit of networks to cancel favorite shows before the storyline can be satisfactorily finished.
I wonder if the experiments had something that related, however vaguely, to lucid dreaming? Then again lucid dreams are supposed to help you understand yourself, not share the dreamscape with others.
I rarely remember a dream these days, or even a part of one although I do still dream. Years ago I thought I'd give lucid dreaming a try using techniques I read about. The problem was that the instructions required that when you awoke from a dream the idea was to turn on a lamp and write down what you remembered. All I ever wanted to do was to go back to sleep.
Inception largely worked for me in part because of it remained focused. While they were entering someone else's mind and dealing with metaphysical concepts, the crew had a clear goal to pursue. One of the big problems with this show is that it feels the need to have its characters address Big Subjects in inflated and imprecise language. That's not very interesting and certainly not very dreamlike, although there are some good visuals.
I do know what you mean about shows getting canceled before they can develop and conclude their storylines. To me this is an argument for working small. I think that every unit of a work--episode, issue, etc--should have a payoff in itself. That's one of the reasons I largely gave up on mainstream comics--issues just became teasers for the graphic novel edition.
I'm with you there. Lucid dreaming sounds great in theory but it's hard to make it work in practice, because of course you just want to go back to sleep. It's a basic human need. So for me learning about the content of your dreams is something that works best without a lot of planning.
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