Waking Life: Film Review

Have you ever experienced the sensation that you are dreaming but cannot wake up? In Richard Linklater's 2001 film Waking Life, this is the plight of the main character: he knows he is dreaming but cannot alter this fact. Not cold water, not shaking himself -- nothing can rouse him. This is the movie's paradox: dreams are supposedly the ultimate embodiment of free will, in dreams, waking or asleep you can do anything, be anything. Yet the man is trapped in a state of slumber and worse yet, he seems to be trapped back in his own hometown, as if he can never escape his past.

In both dreams and reality, our minds create our reality -- reality is only constrained by the limits of our minds. Of course, this seems most clearly evident in dreams, but it could be argued that even in 'real' life we are really only limited by how much we can imagine. The limits of what we think we can imagine are illustrated when the main character asks a woman what it feels like to be a person in 'his dream,' and marvels how she cannot understand this -- she seems to perceive herself as real, and can even think of things he cannot imagine. Is she a side of himself he does not know, or is this an illustration that what feels like our reality is not nearly as secure as we assume it is? What limits us in life may be our lack of daring, not life itself.

Identity is pliable in the film -- the dreamer is all the characters, men and women, good and bad, sane and insane. Dreaming reveals how our seemingly secure identities contain many loose ends. It seems to take us away from the constraints of life, from our physical bodies, yet as another character (or part of the main character, dreaming) says, once our physical body dies, we will likely lose the ability to dream.

This pliability of identity, the constructed nature of reality, and our curious sense of separateness yet dependence upon the physical aspects of our being is also true of our conscious life, although these facts are less obvious when we are 'awake' than when we know we are dreaming -- hence the title of the movie Waking Life.

Works Cited

Waking Life. Directed by Richard Linklater. 2001.