Hacker Cinema
Waking Life
2001 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Richard Linklater
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.
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34 comments on Hacker News
If you liked that video check out the following movie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
This movie, Waking Life, has nothing to do with aliens but is filled with the kind of existential philosophy that the person in the OP’s link talks about.
Are you talking about made for TV animation or others? I would suggest animated feature films such as The Secret of Kells, A Scanner Darkly, or even Waking Life and Heavy Metal to see that this is not entirely the case.
Waking Life is amazing, watching it was one of life-altering events for me. After watching it several times I became curious about the director - Richard Linklater (he's staring as a guy at the Pinball machine in the end of the movie). Apparently he made some other nice movies after Waking Life. I really liked "Boyhood" - there's also really nice story behind shooting the movie - it was shot for 11 year with the same actors showing them growing up / aging.
Recently, Midsommer. I think if you go into it with an open mind (and not get too weirded out by the gore) it asks some really fascinating anthropological and social questions.
By the end of the movie, I was almost entirely on the side of the culture and their behavior made complete sense to me. During the course of the movie I experienced a shift of position and perspective and continues to affect me 4 years later.
All the token others… Pi, Memento, Waking Life, Fight Club, Requiem for a Dream, etc. etc.
I felt like Midsommer was the best interesting film in decades.
Highly recommend the film Waking Life. Fantastic rotoscoped film, dreamy and through provoking. First time I had a lucid dream was the night after watching it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edrGozs6W_I
Very dream like, trippy results! Reminds me alot of Waking Life movie
And waking life, phenomenal film
I saw it used a bunch in early 2000s to reference hip hop that strongly focused on class struggles, race issues, etc.
It was also used in stoner / party culture around that time to describe being in on the secret that the government was bad, capitalism was bad, etc.
Maybe directly influenced by the movie “waking life” but not sure on that. I was a stoner party kid and my memories of that time are pretty hazy. The culture was super accepting, early advocates for lgbtq before it was an acronym, etc. I also remember that group being very very accepting of everyone who had good intentions regardless of views. “___ is good people” was what we used to say. Probably why I dislike the modern version of woke so much.
I love Richard Linklater's work also, especially Waking Life. I was thrilled many years ago to receive a first-contact email from him. (I was, I think, the second featured Creative Commoner (related to releasing worked using Creative Commons licenses), and I think he was the first).
I am usually retired about 2/3 of the time since 1998. During periods when I am not working, I do watch more movies. I am super busy working for a unicorn startup right now, so extra movie watching is put on hold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(1990_film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life are two of my favorite films.
Dreams can be wild, but the writer manufactures their characters from their mind while conscious. The intention and the agency over the creation sets them apart.
I have had only a 1 or 2 lucid dreams, but I couldn't hold the dream state for any appreciable amount of time that I achieved consciousness in the dream world.
I wonder how many writers employ dreams in the creation of characters, if they dream about the stories they write?
> origin of your belief
I guess it's from that movie he quoted, "Waking life", here's the script: https://wakinglifemovie.net/transcript/chapter/18/
May I recommend a movie directed by Linklater called Waking Life.
> Waking Life is a 2001 American experimental philosophical adult animated docufiction film written and directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of reality, dreams and lucid dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life, free will, and existentialism.[3] It is centered on a young man who wanders through a succession of dream-like realities wherein he encounters a series of individuals who engage in insightful philosophical discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
I'm in Austria, so iTunes doesn't have any TV shows at all, and for movies it's hit and miss. Two films I recently looked for and didn't find are "Tank Girl" and "Waking Life", not really any special. I just checked again and apparently Tank Girl is on Amazon Prime! So maybe I'll watch that tonight :)
It's also really bad with kids shows. Netflix and Amazon have a lot of them, but the selection keeps changing, and once something disappears from the streaming catalog it's often gone for good (ie. you can't get it for download anymore either). For one show (Lego Chima) I ended up buying used DVDs because I couldn't find it anywhere to download / stream in German. I have no idea how it makes any business sense to stop selling a TV show just because it's a couple of years old.
..and with no ability to communicate with that brain in a jar, we'd have no idea what's going on inside of it. We could be putting it in hell and never know. It could be like the movie Waking Life, eternal dreaming without ever being able to wake up.
The title of the game/short novel comes to mind: "I Have No Mouth Yet I Must Scream."
Thanks for sharing your experience. Can I ask how you found your sleep paralysis encounters? (for want of a better word).
Personally I've found them deeply disturbing. Throughout my life I have experienced moments of sleep paralysis at most on 10 occasions. They've left a big impact though, and I sympathize with anyone who has the misfortune of feeling as though you are trapped and unable to move.
After watching the film "Waking life" I spent a long time thinking about lucid dreaming and perhaps maybe had 1 or 2 myself. I had never connected the two however, definitely food for thought.
i'll also add that just "attempting" a litmus test can be a sufficient trigger for a lucid state. i'd heard about "flipping the light switch" from the film waking life. i tried it in a dream and the switch worked fine, but it was the fact that i was questioning whether i was in a dream in the first place that lead me to realize i was dreaming nevertheless (i think thats what the top comment is getting at -- strengthening these habits so that you do things like check light switches not because if they fail you know you're in a dream, but to put your mind into a state where you're always questioning whether you are awake. then you can spot the clues
Those who’re interested in lucid dreams should definitely watch the film Waking Life - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
Thanks for sharing, powerful stuff. Reminded me of the film "Waking Life" a little.
I had the perfect use case for something like this last year.
I wanted to make a (very) short movie with a similar feel to Waking Life, except instead of rotoscoped images I just wanted to do varying degrees of edge detection on each frame. It came out looking pretty good but it took a lot of tweaking individual numbers in a python script and repeatedly rendering the same clip before I could even get a set of choices to decide between.
Having something like this with me when I was filming it would have made a huge difference!
Another movie with the same theme is Waking Life. I also found it a lot more thought-provoking than Inception.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/
Oblique strategies made a brief appearance in Richard Linklater's Slacker film.[1] Linklater is more well known for films like Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and A Scanner Darkly, but in my opinion Slacker is by far his best.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_%28film%29
There's a good conversation about this, humans and cell regeneration specifically, in the movie "Waking Life" (as well as many many other great conversations about a variety of philosophies)
A few:
Fight Club: I really didn't understand the concept of anomie before seeing this movie. Normlessness and lack of connection to society's way of things are fundamental issues which are largely ignored in common conversations or articles. This is the same movie that introduced me to post-modernism, nihilism, and existentialism.
Brazil: This film really taught me a lot about how to produce creativity as well as government. One of the main characters is an outlaw "combat" HVAC/plumber who has been forced out of his legitimacy by a sprawling Kafkaesque bureaucracy riddled with incompetence-- the absurdity of the character is illustrative of the bizarre extremes government policy can unintentionally create.
Waking Life: This film is a great representation of what it is like to be dreaming. The film is comprised of a series of barely-related conversations between different dream characters. Waking Life taught me not to be too analytical of art, and to restrain criticism of a new experience. Most importantly, Waking Life taught me that life is a trip, so you may as well choose to enjoy the ride.
The Animatrix. The best reason to watch the live action trilogy is to be sufficiently informed to watch this. It delves far deeper into the philosophy and psychedelia of technology than the live action films. And it's made and voiced by the same people.
Big Fish. How will you live if you know the exact moment you're going to die?
The Wicker Man. Weird. Christopher Lee apparently said it was his best work?
Waking Life.
The Big Lebowski.
A Serious Man
O Brother Where Art Thou.
Much better link, thanks for sharing. I recently watched a movie called "Waking Life" in which part of this speech is mentioned. Glad to read it in its entirety.
To quote a great scene from the movie "Waking Life" [1] by Linklater:
"When I say 'love', the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love, or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say 'Yes, I understand'..but how do I know they understand because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead. You know, and so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed, it's unspeakable. And yet, when we communicate with one another, and we feel we have connected and we think that we're understood, I think that we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion, and that feeling might be transient, but I think that's what we live for".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvnQu30kQ2c
> I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy?
Apart from that there's a couple of films I gladly re-watch (for instance when a friend hasn't seen Total Recall or Waking Life yet), I also keep them around for another reason. It's nice to be able to remember a scene or a quote and be able to look it up easily. And sometimes I do a bit of hobby/amateur sound editing, and it's a great archive of cool soundbites :)
So yeah, I'm keeping around way more than I'll ever watch or re-watch, but the nice thing about having all that storage is you don't have to worry about which data you're going to need in the future.
And for music, there's the added trouble of remembering and finding all those titles. I lost a HD with about 50GB of mp3s on it once, messy but also sorted in various ways, and I'm never going to get that exact collection back. Just over the past couple of weeks I was wrecking my brain trying to remember what was that dark post-apocalyptic ambient album I used to have--though it was a nice exercise in memory, I asked my friends they didn't know, and suddenly one morning in bed it came to me (Bad Sector - Ampos, for those who wonder) ... it's really quite amazing what tidbits of memories one can dig up if you just try hard enough and mull over it for a couple of weeks :)
Still, this discussion is more about those multi-TB harddisks than it is about keychain USB sticks, right? Although 64GB is quite a chunk.
Wiley Wiggins is an actor - he played the kid "Mitch Kramer" in Richard Linklater's (excellent) 1993 film _Dazed n' Confused_ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazed_and_Confused He's been in several other movies including Love & a .45, The Faculty, Waking Life, and Sorry, Thanks.
Now he's working on a kickstarter project, an iPad game called Thunderbeam! - check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wileywiggins/thunderbeam-for-the-ipad
There's also Ashton Kutcher, who said at TechCrunch disrupt that he had learned a bit of programming in college, but I'm not sure he would consider himself a programmer.
Another idea, is to take the best comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments and ask those commenters to discuss them on video, or whatever. There's film called Waking Life, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=waking+life&aq=f You could give HN readers some version of their own Waking Life.
It's kind of out there, but there's a related scene in the film `Waking Life'.
"What is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space."
For the full excerpt and a clip: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/waklifeex/
I have had a lucid dream where I am flying above a farmland. I fall many times but still manage to fly for a few moments. I was showing it to somebody I don't remember. As for the "recursive dream", I did have it after watching Waking Life http://us.vdc.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/
Waking Life? Interesting idea, Ok movie.
Waking Life is a perfect example of something that sends out all the right signals for being artsy and deep to activate the GoodThink centers of your brain without having any actual substance. That movie made me want to punch the director.
Waking Life. Not so much a 'hacker' movie per say, but a great film for anyone who is interested in some heavy thinking and interesting cinematography.