Waking Life – Review

I have to blame this film for getting me intensely fascinated with lucid dreaming. I got into it some time ago, because apart from the fun you can have like flying, I truly believe that lucid dreaming can help you “awaken to the real world”. Your awareness level of the world will increase once you have a lucid dream. In a way, we’re asleep in the waking world and totally awake in the dream world. We have numbed down our senses through time and are unable to experience the richness of the physical world.

Waking Life was directed by Richard Linklater, who has made films like Slacker and Dazed and Confused. The movie was digitally rotoscoped, which means animators traced over lines of the live-action movement. You may have seen this in A Scanner Darkly, which is also a Linklater film or in those Charles Schwab commercials. The movie has no real plot. Mostly, it is about a guy becoming lucid in a dream and not being able to “wake up”.

The animation suits the movie perfectly and there’s no other way it could’ve worked out without it. It uses and mixes many animated styles, with objects floating around, giving it a trippy like sensation. Some scenes have a comic book look and others have a Picasso cubist-like look. It really gives you the feeling like you’re in a dream. The protagonist is mostly interacting with people and listening to their ideas.  Existentialism, the Singularity, the nature of language, re-encarnation, free will… you name it. All those big questions and theories humanity has been trying to answer.

The endless monologue can be tiresome to some, but I’m the kind of guy that drinks coffee all day and reads Nietzsche at midnight. Also, I deeply enjoy films that question the nature of reality or the “meaning” of life. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been exposed to a lot ideas that the dream characters talk about and that’s why I enjoyed it, but I think everybody should see this film. It’s a movie that makes you think and we need more of those.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. – Thoreau

The endless quest of humanity’s obsession with finding the “meaning” of life always ends with no hard answer and that’s what’s fascinating about life. Maybe every answer is right. Maybe in our dreams is were we can get a glimpse.