You know when you watch a film and it ends with “and it was all just a dream”?
I fucking hate that! I hate that so much.
I just watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (what a film!), had a good cry, really enjoyed it. Until I started getting intrusive thoughts, imagining people saying “it didn’t really happen, it’s just a metaphor, maybe it was just a dream.” And now I’m furiously arguing with those little straw men inside my head.
The classic reaction it evokes is “if none of that was real, why did I just watch it?”. Which is fair because it does feel like your time’s been wasted. But I think the real question should be “what fucking difference does it make?”.
What does it matter if it was all a dream? Who cares if the spinny thing kept spinning at the end of the film? Of course it wasn’t real! It’s a story. It was played by actors, written by writers, created with CGI. What fucking difference does it make if we add one more layer of fiction?
Do we have to convince ourselves, even when we have left the cinema, that what we saw actually happened, in order to allow ourselves be moved by it? Do we need the filmmakers to tell us this might not have happened? I don’t get it.
Maybe it’s supposed to make us doubt our own reality: “Hey, we had you going there didn’t we? What if everything else you believed in isn’t really real either? What if you’re just a dream?”
Maybe my annoyance with this is in part due to that fact that I’m pretty over that whole debate when it comes to real life too. It feels immaterial to me whether we are brains in vats, inside an evil demon’s illusion, a turtle’s dream or anything else. All that seems meaningful to call “real” to me is the sensory experience we call “consciousness”. Any speculation of what may be generating that experience feels like a waste of time.
So when we encounter that same kind of argument: “how do we know it wasn’t all a dream?” about something that is already settled as FICTION, that really ticks me off.
Other Thoughts 