(Ans:AI) Yes, the idea that movies are “dreams” isn’t just a poetic metaphor—it is a cornerstone of film theory that has been debated for over a century. Scholars often refer to this as Oneiric Theory (from the Greek oneiros, meaning dream).
The claim usually falls into three main perspectives:
1. The Biological & Sensory Experience
The way we watch movies mimics the state of dreaming. You are in a dark room, physically still, while your eyes and ears are flooded with vivid, “hallucinatory” images that you accept as real.
* Christian Metz: A famous theorist who argued that the cinematic experience is a “technique of the imaginary.” He noted that like a dreamer, the film spectator is in a state of sub-motor activity (you don’t move) but high perceptual activity.
* The “Dream Screen”: Some theorists argue the movie screen acts as a surrogate for the “internal screen” where our dreams play out at night.
2. The Language of Film (Montage)
In real life, you can’t instantly teleport from a kitchen to a mountaintop, but you can in a dream—and you can in a movie through editing.
* Jean Cocteau: The legendary filmmaker famously said, “A film is a dream that we all dream together.” He believed the “magnificent absurdity” of film—where time and space are fluid—perfectly mirrors the logic of the unconscious.
* Susanne Langer: She argued that film’s “mode” is the dream mode. Because the camera moves and shifts perspective instantly, it creates a “virtual present” that feels exactly like the way we experience a dream while we are in it.
3. Psychoanalytic Theory
Ever since Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), theorists have used his work to “read” movies.
* Latent vs. Manifest Content: Just as Freud believed dreams have a surface story (manifest) and a hidden meaning (latent), film theorists argue that movies have a “subtext” that represents the collective desires or fears of society.
* Surrealism: Filmmakers like Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (notably in Un Chien Andalou) explicitly tried to recreate the “logic of the nightmare” on screen, using disjointed images that defy rational explanation.