Movies as Lucid Dreams

The critical, business and celebrity buzz about movies obscures their deep psychological influence over the way we think after seeing them.

For all of my own analytical detachment, I can be extremely influenced for minutes, hours or even days afterward. This is not so much an emotional effect as a cognitive one. The experience of the movie creates a temporary lens through which I interpret the world, a lot like the minutes after waking up from a lucid dream.

The fuzzy pseudo-logic of lucid dreams can pervade one's waking moments all the way to morning coffee. The after effect of certain movies, not all of them, lingers similarly.

I just watched on Blu-ray "A Beautiful Mind" for the first time. When movies are viewed into the wee hours in a dark room when one is sleepy, they can become very much like dreams, evoking similar reactions. I found myself wondering at the end how much of my own life is purely imagined, and even reread my email and blog posts as a reality check. No, I hadn't created imaginary characters or events, but for some minutes the prospect of this worried me.

Movies gain their power, and suffer their limitations, from their similarity to the dream state. They can influence us greatly but the effect fades. If that fading happens rapidly, the most appropriate response is to laugh at oneself.

For some people and some movies, the effect lingers as a personal, recurrent reference point. Do they risk, like Inception's Cobb, becoming stuck in the dream, a moment that lasts forever, a sleep from which they never awake?