"Waking Life" Question & A Question About Lucid Dreaming

Interesting movie that addresses dreams, life, death and even lucid dreaming. The film focuses on the nature of dreams, consciousness and existentialism. Basically, a man shuffles through a dream meeting various people and discussing the meanings and purposes of the universe. It gets pretty high ratings everywhere. It’s definitely different.

The film was entirely rotoscoped, although it was shot using digital video of live actors with a team of artists drawing stylized lines and colors over each frame with computers. It was an extremely well done "semi animation" I guess you could call it, but the heavy handed one-sided dialog kept it from assuming a dream state for me until about half way into the film.

This one is worth staying with until the end, though. This movie is from 2001, but not much more has been learned since Stephen LaBerge’s 1990 classic book “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” of which you can tell he takes many finer points.

I believe this could have been done much better as far as the actual dream sequence and dialog, but none the less it is worth watching. I do applaud it for the main character trying to discern the absolute difference between waking life and that of the dream world.

My question about the movie is - if you’ve seen it - do you think the dreamer is dead or alive?

About lucid dreaming, and another question forthcoming, I did not know that there is a problem with adjusting light in dreams. In other words, if you check a light switch and it doesn’t go on or off, or dim, it’s a sign you are “awaking” in the dream or lucid dreaming. I knew about the clock: if you look at a clock and look away quickly, and look back, it usually changes time or simply blurs while dreaming.

Why do you think this is? I’m not complaining, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone to the clock thing to assure myself I was dreaming and now lucid dreaming.

You can do anything in a lucid dream, fly, go beyond time and space, but you can’t read a clock or control the lighting? Actually, I can understand the clock since time is much different – again you can surely go beyond time and space, I’ve tested this in dreams. But what about the lights? I guess it’s good, though, as far as helping you realize you are dreaming and can turn it into a lucid dream, of which the time/clock part has come in handy for me several times.

Something that wasn’t in the movie, which maybe should have been, since he was trying to wake up, is if you are lucid dreaming and want to wake up you can close your eyes in the dream for several seconds and then open them. That does work. If you want to stay in a lucid dream you can slowly spin around in the dream or focus on an object.

This also wasn’t in the movie for obvious reasons, but it is a good thing to remember because people usually get pretty excited when they begin to realize they are lucid dreaming. It’s the most fantastic thing I know of – by far. And it doesn’t cost anything.

I know this topic is polarizing because most people haven’t lucid dreamed, and even others actually say they don’t even dream at all.