To really grasp the essence of a dream, we have to approach it with more than our mind, seeking revelation rather than explanation — we must hear it without ears, see it without eyes, know it without thinking, cultivating as much intimacy as possible with both its detailing and its mystery.
And to really grasp the essence of what generates and populates our dreams, we must cease identifying with the us who is apparently dreaming them. This is no small task, yet is within our grasp — which is precisely why Inception pulls at many of us so insistently, eluding our attempts to definitively figure it out. Who — or what — is pulling the strings? When is dreaming happening, and when is it not? And how do we know? » Read more: Dream, Dreamer, and Beyond: A Review of Inception
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Great movies are like great dreams — as much as you might understand them, you cannot peel them down to some final meaning. Dreams are moving pictures — did you ever have one where nothing was moving?
We were, once again, working with a couple caught up — or netted — in a dead-end argument, with both making very articulate cases for their position. Yet however novel their verbal fencing and its subtly emotional infusions, it was just more of the same old he-said-she said power struggle. As we pointed this out and had them pay more attention to what they were up to below all the talk, their battle to establish who was right just got more veiled and sophisticated. The thrusts and parries were more spectral, but still had enough impact to keep the power struggle alive. A war for control. Once again. 
When you are asleep at night and dreaming that you are doing something somewhere somewhen, where exactly are you? Are you the body/person in the dream or the body/person asleep on the bed, and if you are identified with neither —for you in fact are capable of holding both as objects of your attention —then just who or what are you? Do these bodies you “see” contain you, or do you contain them? Perhaps both are not literal containers for “you” but rather are expressions, different expressions, of the essential you, means through which you can relate to your current environment, however unusual or alien that might be...
Movie critics generally panned “The Fountain” but really trashed “Lady in the Water,” M. Night Shyamalan’s latest effort. And they didn’t just trash it, but also castigated Shyamalan for the role he played (a character who is apparently destined to have an enormous impact on humanity) in the film. Perhaps what incensed them the most was that the movie critic in the film was not only a desiccated pedant, but also met an untimely death, scripted of course by Shyamalan, who had received some pretty rough treatment from said critics for his earlier films (other than The Sixth Sense).
When well-known radio show host Don Imus was recently [2007] on the national hot seat after uttering his now infamous “nappy-headed ho’s” line (referring “jokingly” to the members of a women’s basketball team), much more was surfacing than just outrage at his racist comment. Imus did eventually get fired, but probably not so much because his employers were outraged at what he’d said, as because some bigtime advertisers were withdrawing from his show. Such a drop in profits, plus general public censure of Imus, were enough to finally persuade CBS to drop him.
News and entertainment have been having a fling for quite a while, and have recently started living together. It’s probably the hottest affair going — there doesn’t seem to be anything that can get in between them — but the tabloids continue to ignore it. The mainstream media now and then addresses it, but only marginally, not wanting to interfere with what provides so much of their income. 
Last night I watched a film called “Instinct,” in which Anthony Hopkins plays Ethan Powell, an apparently insane anthropologist guilty of murder. Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays Theo Calder, a psychiatrist ambitiously trying to “get through” to Powell. At one point, as Calder sticks to his rational guns, continuing to keep himself removed from Powell’s world, Powell seizes him (they’re in a windowless room without any guards), puts duct tape over his mouth, and holds him in a position where he could easily kill him. Calder is obviously very frightened, and clearly in great danger.
Just watched “Stranger Than Fiction,” starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson. I wasn’t expecting much, not being a fan of Will Ferrell, but found myself really getting into the film, and not just because Ferrell came through bigtime. Emma Thompson’s character is Kay Eiffel, a famous and obviously troubled novelist who always kills off her key character at the end of each novel. Harold Crick (played by Ferrell), is, we quickly find out, the protagonist in Kay’s latest novel, which is not yet completed. Once he realizes his predicament (literally hearing the author’s disembodied voice describing exactly what he is doing and is about to do), he desperately seeks to find Kay. His awakening to his predicament shakes his life up, and it is a life in serious need of some serious shaking-up; he is OCD precise and routine-tied to an extreme that is at once laughable and freakishly flat. But awaken he does, and his ossified approach to life gets some bone-cracking and sometimes hilarious input. Other films have dealt with waking up from the trance of everyday automated life, but “Stranger Than Fiction” is one of those that does more than just contrast the slumber of status quo reality and the awakening from it, creatively setting up a gestalt of author and author’s creation, giving that creation a voice and some flesh-and-blood autonomy while simultaneously allowing the author to take a rare (and self-transforming) responsibility for what she has created. And by whose author-ity are we here? When the puppet wakes up, what happens to the puppet-master? When the characters in our dreams really look at us (and they are capable of doing so, if we will but let them), can we say with any authority that we are any more real than them? After all,