Hacker Cinema
Dreamscape
1984 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Joseph Ruben
In order to diagnose the psychic traumas suffered by his patients, Dr. Paul Novotny gets young Alex Gardner to enter their dreams.
1 positive2 neutralfrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
For those of you who are not crusty aging Gen-Xers such as myself, perhaps I can introduce you to the movie "Dreamscape" which I found pretty captivating as a pre-teen.
Looks like it's out there on streaming services still: https://www.tvguide.com/movies/dreamscape/2000115208/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-the-experiential-jaron-lanier-explains-virtual-reality.html Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.
Back when I was in high school, I had to write a term paper and selected the topic of lucid dreaming. I probably put more effort into that paper than any other assignment in all my years of schooling. I went to the local college and looked up every article on the topic I could find. Stephen Laberge had a book out back then (1985) according to Wikipedia, but all I could get were various periodicals. I studiously practiced the techniques he was recommending at the time (waking after a dream, noting it in a journal, staying awake for 5 minutes, repeating the mantra as you fall back to sleep: 'the next time I dream, I will realize that I am dreaming'.
I was amazed at how well a little bit of consistent practice could bring out this ability. I don't recall any negative side effects as others here have mentioned, but then I was a teenager so who knows if I was really tuned-in to how it was effecting me.
I remember being especially entranced by the idea of tests subjects sending coded signals to the waking world through muscular contractions - but then Dreamscape was a relatively new film at the time, so maybe that had something to do with it.