Awake, But Dreaming

In his book Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting, author Robert T. Eberwein notes that “watching a film is like having a dream. Narrative elements sometimes seem to be outside spatial and temporal laws. The viewing conditions in the theater (such as the darkened room and the relative sense of isolation) are reminiscent of our solitary existence as dreamers alone in the night. The overpowering images on the screen sometimes frighten us and make us feel the same kind of paralysis we know in nightmares… [and] even though… the feeling that what we saw seemed very real to us during the experience of viewing… the longer we are away from the film, the more confused our memories of it become. In fact, the difficulty that presents itself as we try to recall the events and details of a film seems similar to that which we encounter as we try to remember dreams.”

These surreal selections from the FMC archive invoke various filmic forms and practices to explore dreams and engender and comment on the oneiric feeling of watching moving images on a screen.