Dreamscape is a 1984 Science fiction film by Joseph Ruben. In this movie we follow psychic protagonist Alex Gardner as he is coerced into joining a secret government project. This project is about dreams and the ability to enter them.
At first, Alex is trained to do boring tasks like guessing the colour of a shape that is hidden from him; however, afterwards he is hooked up to a machine which allows him to enter the dream of whoever the patient is. He is first hooked up to steel worker Bernard and the 2 find themselves in a dream where they are both on top of a building.
His first actual patient is George who has nightmares and constantly finds himself outside the front door; he can never remember what the nightmares are though. When Alex enters his dreams they find Georges wife having an affair with his brother, and his friends… right in front of their kids.
His next patient is Buddy, a little boy who is terrified to sleep due to the fact that he is having the same recurring nightmare. Alex enters the boys dream and is greeted by a stormy night. Turns out Buddy had been dreaming of a scary monster that is always chasing him. Buddy is able to kill this monster and the nightmares stop.
Next, Alex takes on a personal project where he enters the dreams of the woman he has a crush on, Jane. The two get intimate and when she wakes up she’s very upset that he is using his psychic abilities to do things like that. After some berating Alex points out that he was able to do so without being hooked up to the machine. This is a new development in his psychic abilities.
The day after, Alex watches a dream observation done by another psychic named Tommy. During this session the patient goes into cardiac arrest and dies. Alex believes that Tommy did this on purpose and we later find out this is true. There is an ancient believe that once you die in your dream, you die in real life too. Tommy practiced this and it worked.
At the very beginning of the movie we see a man having a nightmare in which a woman is running away and is suddenly engulfed by flames; turns out this was the president.
He had been having reoccurring nightmares for a while now and decides to seek help from the same project Alex is a part of. We soon find out that Tommy has been told by the head to enter the presidents dream and kill him. Alex finds this out and decides to stop him. When he enters the presidents dream he is met with a fiery scene, similar to the first dream we are shown of the woman being engulfed by flames
Tommy shows up and kills a police officer on the train
After running away, Alex realises that he can shape shift and ends up turning into Tommy’s father (who he killed). This distracts Tommy and the president is able to sneak behind him and kill him
Tommy dies in real life and the president is saved.
If we look at all the dreams that were shown in the film we can see how they were influenced by real life. The first dream Alex entered was that of the steel worker and of course we see them on top of a building doing steel work. The next dream was Georges. In this dream he finds his wife sleeping with his brother in front of the kids; turns out George has an inferiority complex and fears that his wife will cheat on him with other men. Buddy’s dream with the monster seems like a regular nightmare however, during the dream, the 2 run pass Buddy’s dad and Buddy says that he is of no help. This could also be from Buddy’s reality, maybe he has a strained relationship with his father. The next dream he enters is Janes in which the 2 got intimate. They both admitted their feelings for each other and happened to have those feelings transfer to her dream. The last dream was the presidents. Looking back at his first dream with the running woman and flames, it’s safe to say that he has underlying guilt due to an incident that has to do with fire. We hear him say ‘I did this’ while riding on the train and looking out at the flames. All of the dreams are examples of real life problems seeping into our unconscious. Problems need to be looked into and when a person decides to ignore them its very natural for the problems to infect the unconscious and play out there. Dreamscape exploits this idea. We are also told about Senoi; the dream people of Malaysia. They were the first people to claim that people can learn to control their dreams to reduce fear and increase pleasure. After looking into this, I believe that the movie was inspired by this movement.
Ayanfe III 