Monday 21 January 2013

Day 21: The Science of Sleep



Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) returns to France after his father dies and gets a job making calendars. He is insecure and spends the majority of his time wrapped up in his dreams; he can behave how he wants there because he controls the show. He falls for his neighbour, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but it’s never quite how he wants it to be because he doesn’t trust that she feels the same.

People quite often say that hearing about other people’s dreams is boring unless you’re in the dream. But I don’t find that at all, I love when people tell me their dreams. How could they be boring? Literally anything could happen, they are so fascinating! It’s like hearing a story and the story is linked to the speaker in ways that aren’t always clear but are interesting nonetheless. I’m going to recount my most upsetting dream here because why not, I make the rules. I’m walking down a street and there are zombies everywhere and they’re crying. Actually, ‘crying’ doesn’t really do it justice. They are sobbing and they just look devastated. I want to help them but there’s nothing I can do. They just sit there, staring at me and crying. The sound of them crying has never left me and I’ve never heard pain quite like it. And I feel like a failure because I couldn’t help them.

Stéphane often confuses dreams for reality and it appears to be becoming more problematic; he asks Stéphanie to marry him because he thinks he’s dreaming but then quickly realises and feels humiliated. Sometimes dreams can be so vivid that it’s almost like it actually happened. I hate the dreams where I love someone because it stays with me for days after and it just feels heavy. Exactly like a weight on me. While I don’t normally confuse dreams for reality, I do sometimes confuse daydreams for reality. I have quite a vivid imagination and when I get lost in thought I usually construct elaborate scenarios and conversations, then once they’re over I forget that nothing actually happened. Before I would meet with people I would try to run through every thread a conversation could take so that I could be prepared and have answers at the ready. But I try not to do that anymore because people go off script so often and it throws me off balance. And it’s so disappointing when you hoped a conversation would go one way but it steers dramatically in another direction. I still try to prepare but the script isn’t so rigid anymore.

While I wanted them to be together it obviously wouldn’t work. His inability to reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality would cause so many problems. And he is massively insecure, at every step in their relationship she would have to reassure him. That’s not fair to her at all. Even though she clearly cares for him, he has to work through that before they would have a chance of lasting.

“Things will turn out the way you want if you could just stop doubting that I love you.”

8/10

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