Wake Me Up When It’s All Over: The Connection Between Dreams and Films
We know they aren’t real because the clue lies in the gaps, the discontinuities, the cuts that our mind detects. Film appears continuous, but it is actually composed of individual still images shown in rapid succession. At the standard cinematic frame rate of 24 frames per second, each image flashes by quickly enough for the brain to stitch them into fluid motion. What we see as movement is really a series of tiny visual interruptions, smoothed over by the mind. As editor Walter Murch notes in In the Blink of an Eye, film renders visual reality discontinuous so that experience does not become “an incomprehensible string without pauses or punctuation”.
Our perception of the world works in a surprisingly similar way. Waking reality may seem continuous, but we constantly interrupt it through blinking. Murch notes that blinking isn’t so much a response to our environment as it is shaped by our emotional state and the nature and frequency of our thoughts. Memory works in much the same way because our recollections of reality are fragmented, spliced, and rearranged. When we look back at certain experiences and say, “Wow, that felt like a dream,” it is because our mind has stitched together fragments into a narrative.
Dreams themselves operate on this discontinuous logic. A childhood bedroom becomes an airport, a stranger transforms into someone we know, hours condense into minutes. Films mirror this through their cuts. The jump cut echoes the sudden shifts of our dreams. Dissolves, where one image slowly fades into another, captures the way dreams blur and bleed rather than break when we remember them. Match cuts, connecting images through shape, movement, or composition, resemble the associative logic of the mind. Daniel Criblez’s new short film, SAME AS U, offers a vivid example, with objects transforming between scenes in surreal, dreamlike transitions. Moreover, elliptical cuts skip the mundane and land on emotional peaks, just as dreams compress hours of sleep into a few vivid moments. Even the smash cut, abrupt and startling, feels like the emotional rupture of a nightmare.
Some films deliberately mimic the sensation of dreaming. In Big Fish by Tim Burton, stories move fluidly between reality and fantasy, unfolding surreal scenes that carry the viewer through a strange, almost mythic journey. The dreamlike quality comes from how exaggerated and improbable everything feels: the oversized characters, unusual props, fantastical world building, and absurd situations the protagonist encounters. Much like in a dream, the circumstances are ridiculous yet strangely believable in the moment.
Similarly, Natural Born Killers , directed by Oliver Stone, creates a dreamlike experience through abrupt stylistic shifts. The film jumps between visual styles accompanied by changes in color, flashes of animation, and sequences that resemble television channels rapidly switching. These disorienting edits destabilize the viewer’s sense of reality, producing an experience that mirrors the instability and intensity of dreaming.
It is this very power to immerse us in foreign, shifting worlds that explains why we watch films. We watch because they reshape reality into alternate stories, timelines, and lives. A film is not just a projection on a screen, it is a projection of what we want to see, what we want to feel.
So why do we dream?
The easy answer is escape, as when daydreaming to avoid reality. But maybe dreaming serves the same purpose as films. We don’t escape reality, but rather we edit it. Not as editors behind the scenes, but as participants inside the fictional world that engulfs us.
We love to dream because dreams connect us to something untraceable and difficult to define, yet they can offer answers in unexpected ways. Feelings in a dream can be vivid, but when we wake, they are often hard to put into words. Sometimes a dream leaves us with a strange clarity or closure, like a familiar face appearing again, words we never expected to hear, an answer to a question we didn’t know we were asking. Even if the events do not make logical sense, the emotions feel meaningful.
We love to watch films because, similarly, they evoke emotions and associations not always explainable in words, leaving thoughts that linger long after the screen goes dark. As Walter Murch suggests, film is the “closest art form to our thoughts”. Each viewer watches the same sequence of images yet experiences it differently, filtered through memory and emotion. What one person takes from a scene may be entirely unique. Just like every dream is, unique within our own mind.
I think, dreams are private cinema, and cinema is public dreaming. What can’t find its way into poetry drifts into dreams, and what can’t reach dreams turns to films. Films serve as a thread, stitching together meetings across reality and imagination that would have never been possible.