Well, Amy and I have been incepted. Good Golly, what a film! Christopher Nolan knocks it out of the park again!
But I do not want to write about the movie because talking about it only raises the chances of me ruining some of it for you, and I would be loathe to be foudn guilty of spoiling a second of the film for anyone.
It did get me thinking about dreaming, though. The Wikipedia article on lucid dreaming has several interesting points:
- Scientists have trained sleepers to use eye movements while in REM sleep to signal back to the outside world that they are in a lucid dream even though brain scans show a sleeping brain.
- Lucid dreamers often “wake up” in a dream within a dream. Sometimes in attempting to be lucid they think that they have truly woken up. They said bed-wetting can occur because the lucid dreamer starts their daily routine, and, as many of us do, head to the toilet after “waking up” end up peeing the bed in a real life.
- People use “reality checks” within dreams to recognize they are dreaming: looking in a mirror and seeing the reflection blurred, looking away from text or a digital clock face and finding it changed or garbled when they look back, etc.
I have had several very vivid dreams, I even wrote an essay on dreaming once that I may have the guts to post someday. I kept a dream journal for a month on my mission and had some interesting experiences (they say practicing dream recall is the first step to lucid dreaming, preferably as close as waking as possible, with eyes closed and moving your body as little as possible).
I think seeing Inception is going to push me onto that band wagon again. I’m going to start recording my dreams and see what comes of it. I’ll return and report.
Thanks Steve! I value and appreciate your perspective and reflections highly. Inception seems to me to be a moilvie worth watching and reflecting on. I would be interested to see a post from you about dreams and revelation.
Well, perhaps I'll get around to that, thanks for the vote of confidence.
I will throw is this out, a quote from Wilford Woodruff I use to kick on that essay. I re-read the essay, not worth posting but maybe there will be some snippets that have something along the line of what you're looking for:
“Now, the Lord has many ways in which He communicates with us. Frequently, as has been the case in every age, truths, principles, warnings, etc., are communicated to the children of men by means of dreams and visions. It is a communication to man. But we have had a great many dreams—I have had in my life, and I suppose you have more or less—which amount to nothing. I will tell you just about what I refer to. A man eats a hot supper when he goes to bed; he gets the nightmare; he is chased by a bear; or he falls over a precipice, and as soon as he strikes the ground he wakes up. Now, the Lord had nothing to do with that. A man may go to bed half-worried to death, tired and dream about something that will never take place. Last night, for instance, I dreamt I was making glass houses out of blocks of glass two feet square. Now, I don't know that the Lord was in that.”
–Discourse by President Wilford Woodruff, The Channels of Communication from God to Man,—Dreams, Visions, etc. Delivered at the General Conference, in the Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Saturday, A.M., October 8th, 1881.
Great WW quote! I know a few pseudo-genealogists who need to hear this (the ones who say they don't need to provide sources for their genealogical info because they got the information in a dream — we have a third or fourth cousin like that, and she's caused all sorts of family history havoc).
Wow. I wish "I had a dream" was a valid for job promotion, world hunger, or male pattern baldness.
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