Question

Module 03 Discussion - Dream or Reality?

The narrative voice ... enters a heavy, dreamlike mode. When the all clear finally sounds and the hum of the metropolis resumes, a central character, who has been venturing a flirtation with another passenger, is jolted into awareness that the possibilities unfolding 'while the city was sealed off' cannot belong to real like. Yet a form of life did surface: however fleetingly, ...enabling a different kind of humanity to emerge" (Puchner, 2012, p. 498).

"Sealed off" by Zhang Ailing is referred to as a psychological fiction where dreams and desires surface. How does the narrative language, description, dialogue, and repetition create the illusion of reality? Be sure to share a quote from the story to support your discussion.

Answer 1

This is akin to the technique wherein a dream sequence is a plot device in which an entire story has been revealed to be a dream. As opposed to a segment of an otherwise real scenario, in these cases it is revealed that everything depicted was unreal. Often this is used to explain away otherwise inexplicable events. Because it has been done in many occasions to resolve a storyline that seemed out of place or unexpected, it is often considered weak storytelling; a particularly referenced example of this is the TV show Dallas in which the entirety of season 8 was revealed after the fact to have been a dream. Furthermore, in-jokes are often made in writing (particularly television scripts) that refer to the disappointment a viewer might feel in finding out everything they have watched was a dream. For example, entire sequences of the Family Guy two-part episode "Stewie Kills Lois" and "Lois Kills Stewie" are revealed to have taken place within a virtual reality simulation, upon which a character asks whether a potential viewer could be angry that they have effectively watched a dream sequence, but this technique can also be effective and its use lauded when the status of dream or reality is left more ambiguous as it was in The Wizard of Oz.

It is important to note that the camera angles and movements used to depict dream sequences enable this kind of play and confusion between the diegetic reality and the dreamed world by presenting the dream world as a visually accessible space in which the character moves around the same as he does in the diegetic reality, as opposed to restricting themselves cinematographically to a subjective viewpoint even though dreams are generally understood to be experienced by the dreamer from their own subjective point of view.^[3]This point is made salient by the films which choose to employ first-person camera angles such as Strange Days (1995) when it depicts recorded memories experienced via the "SQUID" recorder, the first-person sequence of Doom (2005), the beginning of Enter the Void (2010), and others, and how radically these moments stand out against normal cinematography even when the subject matter is something as subjective as a dream. Many have cited the general impracticality and unattractiveness of sustained first-person perspective in film as a reason for its absence from filmed dream sequences.