Mullholland Drive

[Dave Monroe]

>From Jean Tang, "All You Have to Do is Dream," Salon,
November 7th, 2001 ...

"But while 'Mullholland Drive' is odd and surreal,
fractured and dreamlike, it's not as complicated as
these experts make it out to be. For another
interpretation, I recently discussed the film with Dr.
Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst and clinical
professor of psychiatry at Columbia Medical School.
Unlike the film experts, Lane saw 'Mulholland Drive'
as  the product of someone intimately familiar with
dream analysis. And when he shared his interpretation
with me, stray plot lines clicked satisfyingly into
place. 

"It's true, as several critics have reasoned, that the
film's broad-brush examination of illusion, desire,
control and identity should be neither obscured nor
ignored in an examination of plot. (Which is a way of
saying that you don't have to understand the film or
follow the plot in order to like it.) But the fact is
that there is a nearly flawless -- if anachronistic --
structure that allows you to see the way Lynch
examines the parts of lost love, jealousy, revenge,
regret, guilt and suicide that get lost in the
unconscious."

[...]

"No dream is dreamt for two hours at a time -- they're
usually 20 minutes to half an hour. A dream that seems
like it's taking 15 minutes actually takes 15 minutes.
That's been determined in sleep labs. So, contrary to
popular belief, you can't dream a whole story running
for two days in 30 seconds: A dream is a working of
the  mind; you can't think two hours worth of thought
in 30 seconds. 

"So, really, dream time and actual real time are very
similar.... The point is, the narration of a dream is
not identical to the dream itself. What people
experience visually in dreams is a bunch of quick
clicks.... Dream experiences are kaleidoscopic. When
you wake up, you're left with this peculiar experience
you have to convey in a verbal narrative, and your
mind puts it together in a much more cogent way than
you dreamt it, so you can tell it."

[...]

"... the movie was Lynch's version of a manifest
dream. It's like a told dream, not like a dreamt
dream."

[...]

"Along these lines, why do dreams often make internal
sense, or follow a dream logic?"

"They don't. They are 'secondarily revised.' Secondary
revision is what puts the dream in tellable order.
Freud thought it occurs upon waking up -- during the
transition between dreaming sleep and waking. A lot of
people think secondary revision occurs after you wake
up as you're recalling the dream. You're not recalling
'and then I saw this, then I saw that.'"

"So it's impossible to recall the dream the way it
actually happened, because your mind won't let you?" 

"No, you won't. In fact, you may be left only with a
little memory of one image, but there's a whole story
that seems to be connected with it, and your mind
makes  the leap. You don't know if you actually
dreamed it, or if you're putting it together in your
waking mind."

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/11/07/mulholland_dream/index.html

Much more than this here, just selected out some
interestings points about narrative ...

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