Delicious Nightmares

There is nothing novel in the observation that a good cinema experience is akin to a waking dream. We sit in darkness and become enveloped in a world of images that we piece together to form a narrative. Sometimes the images overpower us and we struggle with the paralysis of a nightmare. And then the lights come back up and we take a breath to remember it was not real, we were not in that car crash, we were not in a fight, we were not a lover being romanced. And we need a moment between the last credit and the real world to gather our thoughts to find meaning in what we have seen.

Cinema tells us stories so that we have a way of seeing our uncomfortable, uneasy emotions on screen and know we are not the only ones.

But the dreams we have at night are ours alone. Studies tell us that when we dream our subconscious reaches towards the negative. We are more likely to dream about the bad times, the personal attacks, the humiliation than the love, affection and glory. Robert Stickgold, an American dream researcher – describes it as a ‘nightly bout of clinical insanity’.

Sounds fascinating.

And yet, we know that when we come to share our dreams, even our loved ones might find the narrative boring. How many of us (who aren’t being paid as trained psychoanalysts) get that sinking feeling when a friend starts a conversation with: “I had the weirdest dream last night”

And that means the recently issued Vocal challenge – 3am, write about a recurring dream or nightmare – really is a challenge. How can we make writing about dreams interesting for others?

As an ambitious imaginary 1940s screenwriter, I’m going to suggest that if we want to make dreamscapes compelling for our audience, cinema has lessons to teach us.

So, let’s dig down into what Film Noir can tell us about the art of collective dreaming.

It is through reading about Film Noir that I have learned the word oneiric – which means related to dreaming. Film noir theorists love that word, because the thrillers of the 1940s are all about the uncanny, the familiar being made strange. We are in a world where the layout looks familiar, but the shadows distort or hide menace. As we walk down a street, lights flicker and our stilettos tap in the loneliness. The emotions we experience as we wait for action are suspicion and distrust. Noir echoes our dreamscapes, where the hard edges of truth melt away.

Film Noir is about the fractured psyche. The first half of the 1940s is haunted by Depression era poverty. Women are motivated by memories of hunger, men working all hours inhabiting dusk and dawn. Worlds colliding with passion and fear.

And then a war breaks the decade. Post-war women don’t know if the men they married, and who have been trained to kill, can be trusted. The men haunted by bloodshed, just beyond their trauma, sense the women as distant, aloof, devoid of understanding.

Everything is doubt, distrust, suspicion.

Like dreaming, Film Noir plays with memory, with the past, through flashbacks, voice-overs, riddles. There is a tension between remembering and repressing an unacceptable past.

And in Film Noir, dreams matter. In 1900 Freud published his seminal work on the subconscious The Interpretation of Dreams. The stars on our screens, the writers, the directors belonged to an elite who had access to therapy and believed that psychoanalysis might unlock their dissatisfaction, their unease at the world. That science might uncover the repressed memories, the childhood traumas. Psychoanalysis becomes detective.

But most of all the filmmakers believed their job was to tell a good story. A story laden with meaning, where each gesture matters. And a good story means that there is something missing, something to search for. There is a quest for the missing identity from amnesia, or the motive for murder, or the solution to loneliness.

And this is the stuff of delicious nightmares.

So, these are the guidelines for getting to the heart of writing a person’s dreamscape.

• Make it uncanny. Take the familiar and then disorientate your protagonist
• Give your readers a disturbing point of view – like Joan Crawford being wheeled into a psychiatric hospital on a gurney
• Gaslight your reader, taunt their intelligence by refusing to give them all the details
• Make your reader a detective who needs to decipher symbols
• Ensure good people do bad things and that bad people let them
• Wake them with a gunshot, a scream, a fall from dizzying heights

May all your nightmares be delicious…

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