That's what dreams are made of.
When stories use insanity and magic they are dreamlike. They seduce us with surrealism.
I'm waiting for brain scientists to show movies to viewers strapped into MRI machines recording mind prints of the experience. The brain scientists will compare these with mind prints from the same subjects recorded while they were dreaming. For some titles the mind prints from movies and dreams will match.
What makes a movie gripping is the apparent illogic as it unfolds. Twists and turns defy our expectations. The story will set up expectations and then violate them. It will foreshadow strangeness and then make it happen. In the end we are left wondering what it all means, because it seemed to mean something, but the meaning is not clear. For two hours or so we are dreaming with eyes wide open. The experience echoes, just like a dream, just like a dream.
What is insanity? What is magic? Both are ways of reconfiguring reality. In lucid dreaming just before waking we can influence the reconfiguration, sometimes sleeping through the alarm in order to continue the dream. We get to experience insanity, and exert control over it with magic, and then wake up without consequences. Just like watching a movie.
Someday it won't be the bean counters who run Hollywood, it will be the brain scientists. Test screenings won't take place in Covina, they will happen in a lab. MRI scans will be compared with a massive database of mind prints, and movies will be reedited to firm up any scene where the audience shows signs of awakening from suspended disbelief.
There are some surprises that are still surprising even when we have become entirely familiar with them: orgasmic surprises, fully anticipated, nevertheless startling when the climax arrives; sensual surprises, always pleasurable to the touch, like petting a cat; sentimental surprises, jerking a tear we need to shed. While the memory of a dream fades rapidly, a dream redux is still a dream, always potent, ever surprising.
Psychotropic drugs induce the dream state without turning off sensory awareness. The live feed becomes a dream feed, a dangerous mix. Movies cannot accomplish this mix because the theater shuts out the rest of the world. Home viewing allows the movie to be paused when reality intrudes. Eventually, augmented reality on mobile devices will become electronically psychotropic, making the connected world a collective dream state.
In the Matrix movies, the collective dream state has been imposed upon humanity. The denizens of subterranean Zion, outside the Matrix, live a basic, sensory existence of the flesh, dreaming in their sleep. Humans within the Matrix are always asleep, subsumed by the dream construct created for them. The human travelers between are lucid dreamers. The machines and programs in the Matrix want to dream they are human or superhuman, and only in the Matrix can they fulfill that ambition. The nanites that were sown by humans to block out the sun have used that solar energy to extend the Matrix into the physical world, a nanobot ether pervading all.
When the whole world becomes entranced by the insanity and magic of the dream state, will it sleep through the alarms heralding its demise?
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