Waking Life
Alyssa Pazos
Waking Life
The movie Waking Life explores, in detail, the role of the individual in what they perceive as a reality or as a dream. The entire movie is focused around a character that is stuck in a series of different dreams with different philosophers, people, artists etc. In the beginning of his dreams he just sits and listens to whomever he is speaking to, he never spoke back. As the movie progressed he began to speak back to the people he was confronted with and have conversations with them. This was because he learned that he was lucid dreaming and trying to awake himself from his long dream. One of the most fascinating ideas in this movie is brought up by a couple lying in bed. The woman explains that she feels as if she is an old dying woman who at that moment is reliving her life in her mind and they are just products of memory and not real. The man went on to say that a minutes of a wake life could be just a second in dream life. I went on to read more about this and found a Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu. Tzu, in summary, could not come to the conclusion to whether he was a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man. Another fascinating scene is when the protagonist confronts a man sitting on a chair in a white room with stained glass windows. He goes on to say that dreams are real as long as they last and that you can say the same thing about life itself, it is only real if it lasts. He goes on to say that he and the protagonist are oneironauts that are explorers of the dream world. He turns after speaking to this man and another man with a ukulele he approaches a friend of his in the same room sitting on a chair. The friend explains himself to be the “social lubricator” of the dream world, that he is helping people become more lucid in their dreams. He goes on to explain that people don’t ask themselves whether or not they are sleeping in their wake states or in their dream states so we end up with a bunch of
Waking Life
The movie Waking Life explores, in detail, the role of the individual in what they perceive as a reality or as a dream. The entire movie is focused around a character that is stuck in a series of different dreams with different philosophers, people, artists etc. In the beginning of his dreams he just sits and listens to whomever he is speaking to, he never spoke back. As the movie progressed he began to speak back to the people he was confronted with and have conversations with them. This was because he learned that he was lucid dreaming and trying to awake himself from his long dream. One of the most fascinating ideas in this movie is brought up by a couple lying in bed. The woman explains that she feels as if she is an old dying woman who at that moment is reliving her life in her mind and they are just products of memory and not real. The man went on to say that a minutes of a wake life could be just a second in dream life. I went on to read more about this and found a Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu. Tzu, in summary, could not come to the conclusion to whether he was a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man. Another fascinating scene is when the protagonist confronts a man sitting on a chair in a white room with stained glass windows. He goes on to say that dreams are real as long as they last and that you can say the same thing about life itself, it is only real if it lasts. He goes on to say that he and the protagonist are oneironauts that are explorers of the dream world. He turns after speaking to this man and another man with a ukulele he approaches a friend of his in the same room sitting on a chair. The friend explains himself to be the “social lubricator” of the dream world, that he is helping people become more lucid in their dreams. He goes on to explain that people don’t ask themselves whether or not they are sleeping in their wake states or in their dream states so we end up with a bunch of