It was on a nighttime car ride when I asked my younger son, “Don’t you think it’s strange that we go to sleep every night and have dreams?”
Even though my question was from left field, my son did (and does) indeed find the concept of dreams strange. Which begs the question: what’s even going on with us?
Think about it: every night, we lie down and… sometimes… experience these semi-coherent movies in our heads. And they are, indeed, movies. Not because dreams are movies, but because movies are dreams.
To explain: when human beings invented movies, we were finding a way to externalize our dreams. Sometimes movies carry daydreams, yes. Sometimes they show us aspirational dreams, too. But the real ones, the deep ones, the nighttime ones – those dreams have a deep and holy kinship with the movies.
Books don’t get us there. Plays don’t get us there. Music doesn’t get us there.
And social media and mobile devices certainly do not get us there.
The social media videos we see on our phones are to movies what KFC is to fine cuisine. They’re the dream without the dream; the form without the function; the surface without the grand interior. This deprives our species of a certain self-understanding; day in and day out, we’re lulled into believing that we’re creatures of superficiality, of compulsion, of rushing, of struggling-to-stockpile-information.
But we’ve only become those things. They are not fundamentally who we are.
Who we are has deeper contours. Who we are is a mystery. Who we are is defined by texture, rhythm, light, sound, and heat.
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Which is why I’m grateful my two Gen Alpha sons love movies, in a world where games, tablets, and social feeds are trying to grab their attention every second. But when they sit down to watch movies, they go a little slower, even if they’re watching “Sonic the Hedgehog.” Movies are a different kind of ritual. They’re settling down to see stories. Which is to say, they’re slowing their systems to spend some time contemplating what it means to be a person (yes, even if it’s Sonic on the screen).
Scorsese speaks often about visual literacy: how important it is to take seriously the substance and value of moving pictures. I’ll go a step further: I’ll take a stand for Dream Literacy.
How important it is to take seriously the fact that we’re human and alive, and that there is no more vivid evidence of that aliveness than our dreams.
The ones we have, as well as the ones we share.
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Lately, I fear we only truly see ourselves in the nighttime hours, in our dreams.
Which is why we must watch movies – and why we must make them. By watching and making movies, we get a chance to look at the screen, then point and say to each other, “Look who we are! Look how bewitching and ravishing. Look how mysterious and eternal…”
Even though all movies aren’t created equal, there seems to be a universal rule: the better the movie, the deeper the dream state it evokes. That’s why we worship Bergman and Spielberg or Varda and Peele. We behold grand visions. We honor the ancient process of look-and-see.
Those who choose to look away? They aren’t just avoiding the screen. They are avoiding the might and danger of their deeper selves.
But you can’t avoid those when you go to sleep. If you’re human, your dreams will always find you.
Which is why you need to go and find them first.
