大象传媒

1. Inception

Christopher Nolan's 2010 blockbuster has Leonardo DiCaprio as a thief who uses technology to break into people's minds and steal valuable secrets from their dreams. It’' an action movie in which anything is possible.

Always a filmmaker who enjoyed digging into how the human brain works – in the likes of Memento and Insomnia – Inception gave Nolan a canvas (and budget) to play on a massive scale. The level of complexity and ideas within ideas became a hallmark of his, seen again in the mind-twisting Interstellar and Tenet. Mark Kermode describes Inception as “On Her Majesty's Psychiatric Service. I love the idea of a James Bond thing playing out in different levels of dreams.”

2. The Sopranos

Dream sequences were frequently used in The Sopranos, the saga of the life of mafia boss Tony Soprano, as a way to get inside the head of Tony and reveal things he wouldn’t say out loud.

One dream, in the 2000 episode Funhouse, sees him chatting to a dead fish who tells him he’s been betrayed by one of his friends. “That was a great episode,” says Mark's Screenshot co-host Ellen E Jones. “It gave us some insight into Tony's paranoid state of mind and how he was repressing knowledge that he had about his friend.”

3. The Big Lebowski

Dream sequences can give a film's director(s) a chance to just play, to go completely overboard with the style in a way they might not get away with in the rest of the film. That applies to a sequence in the Coen Brothers' 1998 comedy about a drifter who gets accidentally embroiled in a kidnap plot.

The memorable scene has The Dude dancing through a bowling alley that's packed with sexual symbolism. “It's all done in the style of a Busby Berkeley musical,” says film critic Anne Bilson, who questions whether it makes actual sense for the character, who is a man of rather uncomplicated thoughts. “I love that dream but I never connected it to The Dude. I think it's more a vision of the Coen Brothers.”

Ellen adds, “A good dream sequence should make sense as the kind of dream a character would have.”

4. Living in Oblivion

If there's such a thing as a realistic dream sequence, perhaps the best example is in Tom DiCillo's 1995 indie comedy about a stressed director making a low-budget film. “It's in three parts and the first two parts turn out to be dreams, but you don't know they're dreams until the very end,” says Anne Bilson. “They're just like real life but with things going wrong.”

It's also a comment on the silly cliches of dream sequences. In the third part the fictional director tries to film a dream sequence, which bears no resemblance to the twisted logic of his own dreams and instead includes a smoke machine and a dwarf. As the actor playing the dwarf (a pre-fame Peter Dinklage) in the movie says: “Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it?”

5. Dallas

This is perhaps the most famous dream sequence in the history of television, for audacity rather than brilliance. Ellen calls the extended Dallas dream sequence an “absolute barrel-scraping example [of] when the writers have run out of ideas”.

At the end of the show's eighth season, the popular character Bobby Ewing was killed off. At the end of the ninth season, aired in 1986, he suddenly reappeared in the shower as if nothing had ever happened. It was revealed that the entirety of season nine took place in the sleeping head of Bobby's wife, Pamela. As Ellen says, “they were desperate to bring Bobby Ewing back”.

6. Eraserhead

“The works of David Lynch, as a whole body, constantly return to the idea that we live inside a dream,” says Mark. Dream logic applies in many of his films, never more strikingly than in his 1977 debut Eraserhead, a bizarre horror – which Lynch called “a dream of dark and troubling things” – about a father and his very peculiar baby.

It may all be dream sequence. “It’s more nightmare than dream,” says Sandra Hebron, psychotherapist and Head of Screen Arts at the National Film And Television School. “What it does, really beautifully, really radically, and really inventively, I would say, is it explores fear of parenthood, particularly fear of being a father.”

Lynch was also responsible for one of television’s most talked about dream sequences, in Twin Peaks. It featured a red room, a dwarf talking backwards and bizarre dialogue. It was so imitated that it led to some of those cliches DiCillo mocked in Living in Oblivion.

7. Spellbound

To create the dream sequence in this psychological thriller, released in 1945, Alfred Hitchcock went to the king of surrealism: Salvador Dali.

Dali devised a parade of odd imagery, but it's not random . Sandra Hebron calls this “the first film to use a dream sequence as something that propels the narrative. The dream sequence actually solves a number of elements in [the central mystery of the] film.” If only all our dreams were so easy to decode.

8. The Wizard Of Oz

“Nearly the whole film is a dream,” says Anne Bilson, of this 1939 classic, about a girl who is whisked to a magical world after being knocked unconscious during a storm. “The dream is in colour, the reality in black-and-white.”

Ellen points out how the film plays with a common form of dream logic. “I love that one because it has that thing of recasting people from [Dorothy's] life in these fantastical roles within the world of Oz,” she says. “There’s that kind of mixed identity that does feel familiar from dreams, where you might have someone with the face of your mother 'playing' your school teacher.”

9. Un Chien Andalou

One of the earliest dream sequences in cinema was in 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, directed by Louis Bunuel and co-written with Salvador Dali, 15 years before he worked with Hitchcock. It was, says Anne Bilson, “inspired by dreams they'd had. One was having a cloud cutting the Moon in half, which turned into a human eye being sliced with a razor.” (It was claimed later by Bunuel to be a dead calf's eye.)

There were several such disturbing images. Bilson says: “They were hoping to shock everyone, but all the Parisians who came absolutely loved it. I think the filmmakers were a bit disappointed. They were hoping to start a riot or something.” Well, dreams rarely go where you expect.

Hear more about Mark and Ellen's journey into the world of dreams on screen by listening to the full episode on 大象传媒 Sounds.