Where's the Chicken, Where's the Egg?

"I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood." - Rainier Marie Rilke

Dreams, and the permeable layer between the conscious and unconscious mind have inspired quite a lot of ink-spilling across the decades, and for good reason. We all dream, and yet it is such a private activity. Unlike a story that I might tell from life - one with a setting that you can visit, characters that you know or whose existence you can at least verify, and a timeline that proceeds contiguous with your perception - a dream exists solely within the mind of the dreamer. Obviously, therefore, the life and obsessions of the dreamer have enormous influence on the dream state.

I have very cinematic dreams. They almost all take place from a third-person perspective (I can see myself) and include establishing shots (a long-distance wide-angle perspective of the dream world - which is often a very wild and overgrown variation of San Francisco, but the bridges are incomplete), long tracking shots or swooping helicopter movements (q.v. any shot in a movie where the camera tracks a car from above), impossible shots (my dream perspective often likes to push through building windows, trees, airplanes and my own head) and sudden shifts in perspective (I am watching a television show and suddenly find myself in the action of the show's narrative). I stayed in a cabin for three years one night and another time edited something like six months into a variation on your standard sports movie training montage. Very often there is music, usually a song I actually know, but the source of the music is non-diagetic (the me that I am watching in the dream does not hear the music; the me that is dreaming does) and serves as counterpoint and rhythm to the dream edits (see Fincher's Zodiac and its use of "Hurdy Gurdy Man").

Certain aspects of modern life have become more rapidly and universally incorporated than others. Airplanes, automobiles, television sets, computers, skyscrapers, etc. But changing the actual nature of the dreams? How they are structured and perceived? Only film has had such a tactile effect.

Unless, of course, all those camera movements and fancy perspective switches were present all along, and it's the language of film that's been cribbing from our collective unconscious. After all, when I was six I had a dream that spread over five nights and had a title sequence. I'm pretty sure that I'd yet to sit through a miniseries.