Vanilla sky is a 2001 thriller directed by Cameron Crowe. In this film we follow protagonist, David, as he seemingly loses grip on reality.
David is a handsome publishing mandate who has an on again off again relationship with a woman named Julia. While at a party, he meets another girl named Sophia and the two hit it off. Noticing this, Julia asks David to take a ride with her in which she confesses her love for him. As she is manically expressing this, she crashes the car killing herself and leaving David with a disfigured face.
This takes a toll on David but after a while he plucks up the courage to visit Sophia. The two decide to give their relationship a second shot and go out that evening; however, David ruins this as he gets completely drunk during this date. He falls asleep on the pavement and wakes up to Sophia crouching in front of him; they have gotten back together. For a while things are absolutely perfect: David was able to get plastic surgery that fixed his face and his relationship with Sophia is still going strong; however, as time progresses things start to get weird. David meets a man in a bar that tells him that he can control everyone else if he wanted to; which he does.
He also starts to have nightmares where his face is disfigured again. David continues to lose his grip on reality when he sees that Julia has replaced Sophia and all the pictures he had of Sophia were replaced by Julia. Confused, he smothers Julia with a pillow killing her. While locked in an interrogation room, he loses his cool and finds himself running through a building. An elevator dings open and he is greeted by the same man that he saw at the bar. This is where we find out that David actually killed himself after he messed up his date with Sophia and his body has been cryogenically frozen for 150 years. Everything that happened after he woke up on the pavement was actually a lucid dream that David was controlling.
If we look back at these scenes we can actually see how David is controlling this dream of his. At the beggining of the movie when David meets Sophia, he tells her about his love for Monet and his paintings. When David first wakes up on the pavement the sky is very similar to that of the Monet painting he showed Sophia
We are also told that certain movies and iconographies David had seen during his life influenced his dream too.
Somewhere along the line David lost his grip on the reality of his unreality and started to have nightmares. There was a ‘glitch’ in his system. After explaining everything to him, the weird man tells David that the glitch is fixed and he can choose to continue his dreams or he can be woken up and live in real life. David chooses to wake up and in order to do so he has to face his fear of heights and jump off of a building. He does this and the movie ends with him waking up.
It is said that dreams are the fulfilment of suppressed wishes; this concept is strongly used in this movie. We can tell this by looking at what happened directly after David woke up on the pavement. Firstly, the sky was constantly a projection of a Monet painting. Next, his face was fixed even though it was deemed impossible to do. Afterwards, his relationship with Sophia blossomed. And lastly, he gained a father-son relationship with the court psychologist (his parents were killed in a car crash, so maybe this relationship was due to the loss of his father). Everything was perfect and this was because his supressed wishes were played out in his lucid dream.
Ayanfe III 