Say hello to ‘lucid-dream cinema’ – the phenomena of watching movies while you sleep.
In this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam - Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his SleepCinemaHotel exhibition, an operational hotel in an open-space hall. It came complete with beds, showers, and hammocks for guests to lay their heads.
Here’s where it gets really interesting:
Hypnagogic images – the kind of imagery you see in your mind when you doze off – were projected onto the hotel walls. The images were of different sorts such as sleeping humans, sleeping animals, clouds and water.
Over the five day stretch the hotel was open, the same image was never projected more than once. Here’s what director Apichatpong Weerasethakul said on the matter:
"The sea is a place that inspires you to think, to align various thoughts. The horizon is the border between day and night. It evokes contradictions, such as death and life, consciousness and dreams."
Weerasethakul wanted his guests to create their own new images in their minds, as the ones projected onto the hotel walls infiltrated their unconscious during their sleep.
In the morning, guests were encouraged to write their dream images down in the “Dream Book” and enjoy their Mango sticky rice breakfast.
Could lucid-dream cinema become a real pop-culture trend? Hear Apichatpong discuss why he believes dreams function as a very particular and personal form of cinema.