i must be dreaming

Dreams That Eyes Can See

These are the films that best evoke dreams for me in one way or another. Dreams as I experience them, and the way they feel to me personally. “Dream-like” is a term that I tend to avoid using without any context, I find it too interchangeably used with “atmospheric”, and atmospheric is great, but this is about a particular type of atmosphere. The uncanny, for example, often is something that does the trick for me, or when events in the film could just as well be seen as manifestations of a character's unconscious.

"Surreal" is another word that I tend to avoid in this context, I associate it too much with symbolism, a work that tries hard to make you derive some metaphorical meaning from it, which often takes away from creating a state of dreaming. Maybe in retrospect you can read a dream in terms of symbols, but I’m not interested in this here, I rather want the actual experience of dreaming replicated as vividly as possible.

Also worth mentioning are the (generally metaphysical) concepts that at least in my mind have some overlay with dreaming, so the films here that you may find have no apparent connection to dreams likely relate to one or some of the following things: Subconscious, collective unconscious, death (or rather the afterlife/netherworld), trance, altered states, stream of consciousness.

In approximate order of evocativeness.

List also available at: https://mubi.com/lists/i-must-be-dreaming https://letterboxd.com/systematicer/list/i-must-be-dreaming/