A Dream Within a Dream?

"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"

 

-- Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream

Starting with a quote like that, what else could the topic be but Inception, the new movie about dream thieves? It's a complex thrill ride into the subconscious unknown, a special effects-laden realization of Poe's poem that tunnels several layers deeper.

With an ending open to interpretation, Inception is all the buzz on the Web as armchair critics psycho-analyze, debate and advance their own theories as to whether Leonardo was awake or asleep.

Rather than pile on to that thread, how about a fond look back at Hollywood's love of mind games?

Well before The Matrix mesmerized, Fifties sci-fi flicks were already delving into what makes the brain tick. Remember Donovan's Brain, where a disemboided brain orders murders from the soupy environs of a bubble-bath?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers took a more philisophical turn when it proclaimed, "In time the mind will figure out everything from the atom to the universe -- everything, except itself."

In Forbidden Planet, the topic of a previous blog post, the alien Krel race advanced to the pinnacle of ultimate achievement, only to be destroyed in a single night. By what? "Monsters -- monsters from the Id."

More recently, how real is real was examined documentary-style in both What the Bleep Do We Know and Mindwalk. While we didn't get any answers, both made subjects like quantum physics and string theory at least entertaining.

Bottom line, both in and outside Hollywood, we really don't know a lot more today about the BIG QUESTIONS than Poe speculated 150 years ago in his prose. I can't even be certain if this blog post is real or a blog within a blog within a blog.

Quick-- somebody get me my totem!