Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmugan | Hacker News Reader

I love dreams, but I hate when dreams are shown in movies or characters describe them in books. I just skim until reality resumes. Dream interludes almost never offer insight and are just boring.

View on HN

Depictions of dreams in movies can offer insight, but that's why I really dislike them: it seems like really lazy writing. "How did he figure that out?" "Oh, it just came to him in a dream." I prefer characters that can think and work things out themselves, instead of just being handed the answer by the script itself.

The character can find the answer, but how do you the viewer know what happens in their head to reach it? Either they deliver a bunch of exposition to explain themselves, or the director uses the medium more effectively to actually show you what is happening in their head.

In movies dreams are usually the most insightful. It's just insightful to the characters state of mind, not the nuts and bolts of plot progression.

True. But they never seem to convey more than "character X is worried about potential event Y."

"Character dreams about X" is just a cheap cop out. Real people anxious about things show that stress in many ways, and aren't always able to just direct it into a single coherent dream that gives them sudden illumination. It just comes across as lazy writing...

And never forget the outrage created by https://dallas.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dream_Season

When you make the audience invested in the storyline only to completely yank it by saying "it never really happened," turns out they become aggitated.

It can occasionally work in films but they need to be used very intentionally. I'm think like in The Big Lebowski or vaguely Being John Malkovich

I agree with you. The only good dream sequences I remember are from dharma and greg, they act like my dreams. https://youtu.be/-on07_-ixTI

Dreams are just stories. Through the lense of the audience they undergo the same critical scrutiny as any other story. It's not good enough to put a stamp 'dream' on a story that doesn't make sense and think the audience will be ok with it. IMO dreams are good in novella format where the line between reality and fiction is blurred out, like the work by Jorge Luis Borges.

You should check out the comic series sandman. Or the first season of it on Netflix. The whole thing is about dreaming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com