Dream sequence

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For the album, see Dream Sequence (album).

A dream sequence is a technique used in storytelling, particularly in television and film, to set apart a brief interlude from the main story. The interlude may consist of a flashback, a flashforward, a fantasy, a vision, a dream, or some other element.

Purposes

Commonly, dream sequences appear in many films to shed light on the psychical process of the dreaming character or give the audience a glimpse into the character's past.[1] For instance, in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the purpose of Pee-wee's dreams is to inform the audience of his anxieties and fears after losing his bike.[citation needed] Other times major action takes place in dreams, allowing the filmmaker to explore infinite possibilities, as Michel Gondry demonstrates in The Science of Sleep. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett points out in the book The Committee of Sleep that, while the main content of dream sequences is determined by the film's overall plot, visual details often reflect the individual dream experience of the screenwriter or director. For Hitchcock's Spellbound, Salvador Dalí designed sharply angled sets inspired by his own dream space. Ingmar Bergman lit dream sequences in several films with a harsh glare of light which he says reflects his own nightmares (though most people's have dim light), and Orson Welles designed a scene of The Trial to reflect the manner in which architecture constantly changed in his dreams.[2]

Films normally present dreams as a visually accessible or objectively observed space, a discrete environment in which characters exist and interact as they do in the world rather than restricting themselves to the subjective point of view a dream is normally experienced from in real life.

Christian Metz, believe the viewer identifies.[3][4]

It is also possible to

tenth-season
premiere "Return to Camelot" revealed that the events between Bobby's death and the end of season nine were all part of a nightmare his wife was having.

Techniques

Audio or visual elements, such as distinctive music or coloration, are frequently used to signify the beginning and end of a dream sequence in film. It has also become commonplace to distinguish a dream sequence from the rest of the film by showing a shot of a person in bed sleeping or about to go to sleep. Other films show a dream sequence followed by a character waking up in their own bed, such as the dream sequence George Gershwin composed for his film score to Delicious. In classic Hollywood, the wavy dissolve was the standard way to transition between reality and a dream; there would be a close-up of the character having the dream, which would begin shimmering as we crossed over from reality to fantasy.[5] One of the most common contemporary transitions into a fantasy is to zoom in on a character's face and then spin around to the back of that character to reveal that he/she is now standing in an alternate reality.[5] Perhaps the most common technique today is the post-reveal in which a character is shown in an awkward or unusual situation, the scene builds to an even more absurd or unusual situation, and then suddenly there is a cut to the character waking up,[5] as exemplified by the opening sequence of Bring It On where a pep rally with irreverent routines builds into an abnormal moment where a character is revealed topless; she then wakes up to the viewers' realization that she had been dreaming.

This is akin to the technique wherein a dream sequence is a

The Wizard of Oz.[6]

The

subjective viewpoint even though dreams are generally understood to be experienced by the dreamer from their own subjective point of view.[3] This point is made salient by the films which choose to employ first-person camera angles such as Strange Days (1995) when it depicts recorded memories experienced via the "SQUID" recorder, the first-person sequence of Doom (2005), the beginning of Enter the Void (2010), and others, and how radically these moments stand out against normal cinematography even when the subject matter is something as subjective as a dream. Many have cited the general impracticality and unattractiveness of sustained first-person perspective in film as a reason for its absence from filmed dream sequences.[3]

History

A dream sequence in Life of an American Fireman (1903)

The dream sequence that Atossa narrates near the beginning of

G.A. Smith's use of a dream sequence in Let Me Dream Again (1900), but is careful to note the precariousness of claiming any film the first to feature a dream sequence given the rapid transnational development of cinema in its early years and that so many films from the period have been lost.[3]

Walters traces the dream sequence technique of revealing one thing to be another (revealing what the audience thought was a dream to actually be reality), back to

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906).[3] What is important to note is these films created a model for dream sequences in which a character's inner thoughts are not represented subjectively (from the character's point of view), but from an objective camera angle that gives the audience the impression less of a character having a dream than of being transported alongside the character into a dreamed world in which the character's actions are captured by the camera in the same way they are the films' real fictional worlds.[3]

References

  1. ^ Montgomery, Mark (December 2010). "Dreaming Up Dream Sequences". Videomaker: 57–59.
  2. ISBN 978-0982869505
    .
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-1841502021
    .
  4. ISBN 0195105982
    .
  5. ^
    ISSN 1092-2016
    .
  6. ^
    ISSN 1092-2016
    .
  7. ISBN 0748619879
    .
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