I Don't Want to Be An Ant

[bcholmes]

I picked up a coupl'a new DVDs this past weekend. One of them was Wild Strawberries, which I had never seen before. They say that if you've seen all of Ingmar Bergman's films, you've seen one.

I also bought a copy of Waking Life, which really interested me. It's a disjointed story about a guy who can't wake up from a dream. And he talks to people about life, and postmodernism, and God, and whether or not we're all just sleep-walking through life. Really interesting film. The sequence about the woman who decides to have a real conversation with someone she passes in a stairway because she doesn't want to be an ant is just great. And the Holy Moment. And the pinball player who talks about time being our perception of a moment when God asks us a question.

How did this movie get made? It's weird and erudite and amusing and philosophical. Perhaps a bit dry at times, and its lack of narrative focalization is probably a turn-off to many, but I liked it.

"Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day
In a vision, or in none
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allen Poe

There's a scene in Waking Life where someone talks about the tell-tale signs of dreams: inability to read digital clocks or small print on things. And the inability to change the light levels. Go over to a light switch and try to change turn the lights on or off. If the light doesn't change, you know you're in a dream.

Steve Wright has a gag:

In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany.

She said, "Cut it out"

I have a light switch like that in my house. Every once in a while, I flick it on and off, and if there's someone nearby, I tell them the Steve Wright story.

Not every moment in our lives can be the Holy Moment.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine had a switch like that in his house. He used to flick it on and off every so often for fun. Eventually he discovered that it controlled the heat for the people who lived upstairs (it was a house from which his basement apartment had been rather crudely split). He also had a wonderful stairway to nowhere (it just led up into the ceiling).

I'm not sure that I would want to know whether I was in a dream or not, were I dreaming. While I understand that lucid dreaming is an empowering skill, I think that there's a certain value in being able to experience an alternate reality and not have to render it as an object within our assumed "reality". Feeling another place, another space to be as real as this for a period, and then to shift between the two, likely has a great deal of positive influence on our ability to understand that others have different perspectives from ours, or equal validity.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

Lucid dreaming feels to me *more* like being in an alternate reality, when I manage it. I get to choose how I act in it, is all. It's not quite as free-flowy and irrationally mutable, though. So I'm not sure it's as good for making some kinds of connections.