• Inception, 2010
• Paprika, 2006
• Vanilla Sky, 2001
• Waking Life, 2001
• Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), 1997

Five points, five elements, five fingers, rubbing the tired eyes back to reality…

There are so many more dream movies, of course. 8 ½ is a personal favorite, if more a flashbacky/daydreamy movie than a dreamy movie pur sang. The movie is, overall, a beautiful way to send someone into that dreamlike state, the demi-torpor of the child-whose-attention-has-been-captured, the lover affixed to the beloved’s inscrutable, lovely eyes.

Here I would be remiss not to mention the dream literature (De Quincey, Kafka’s journals) that has inspired so many of these dreaming–am–I–dreaming? acts of cinephrenia, in which we descend continually through layers of the dream, searching for that paradoxical oneiromancy that will, oroboros, cast us back up from the dream, into that waking dream, consciousness. (In Inception, this dream-extinguishing is called the Kick.)

Frankly, looking back at recent dream-cinema, I’m surprised they still haven’t made/fucked up a Sandman movie yet…

Tigers, sexuality, and massive plants—yep, that sounds about right. Here we have The Dream by Henri Rousseau…