Is this what dreams are made of?
Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom. Well, who am I to keep you down?
If you’re a returning reader, thank you!
If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy Highly Transmissible, a daily newsletter about what to watch during quarantine.
The longer the quarantine drags on, the stranger my dreams become.
Two nights ago I dreamt that I was in Las Vegas, only it wasn’t Las Vegas as we know it. The hotel we were staying at was a life-size, historically accurate replica of the Titanic, only you got to experience it sink every night. (I’m relatively certain this idea comes from a Rick & Morty episode, although it’s been ages since I last watched it. Either way, experiencing it in a dream was horrifying.)
After the Titanic sank, we were greeted by a representative of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors bureau, who wanted to give us a tour of all of the city’s finest establishments. Instead, though, he took us around to all of the seediest hotels and gambling dens on offer. He also repeatedly told me that there was no coronavirus in Las Vegas.
I’m quite certain this is rooted in the mayor of Las Vegas’ recent escapades.
I believe last night’s dreams involved someone chasing me around a nuclear missile silo while I tried to organize a bunch of looseleaf papers.
I have no explanation for this.
Dreams are funny things. They don’t really exist, except that we all experience them on a daily basis. Freud believed our dreams were indications of subconscious urges. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams could foretell the future. Calpurnia experienced nightmares the night before Julius Caesar was killed on his way to the Forum (just outside the bathrooms, in fact). Plato argued that there were two types of dreams, those that were true and derived from the gods, and those that were false and were produced as a result of physical or mental conditions.
In ancient hospitals operated by the cult of Asclepius throughout Greece and Anatolia, patients with a variety of disorders—particularly mental illness—were treated through dream therapy. Their bunks were constructed alongside the inner, curving wall of the hospital. Behind that wall, the priests would creep in the night and whisper to sleeping patients to induce dreams.
The unnamed author of On Regimen, a Greek medical text from the 4th century BC, explains the ancient understanding of the meaning of dreams like this:
Whatever dreams are divine and foretell evil or good to communities or to private persons have interpreters who are in possession of an art concerning such matters. But whatever physical symptoms the soul foretells—surfeit, depletion, excess of what is natural, change to what is unaccustomed—these things, too, have interpreters, and sometimes they chance to get it right, but at other times they miss the mark.
Dream interpretation, it seems, is a fickle thing, but that hasn’t stopped anyone in the thousands of years since On Regimen was written.
Perhaps the ancients were onto something. People everywhere are experiencing troubled dreams as of late. If we follow Plato’s line of thinking, these dreams come from two sources—either they are true dreams that predict the future—or they are the result of a social or physical malady. I hope my dreams are a result of the latter, because otherwise Las Vegas is about to become an even stranger place than it was before.
Today’s Film: Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
Every year brings another stupid kids movie, one of those noisy, animated light shows that exist for the express purpose of captivating developing brains with the visual equivalent of smack. Despite a lot of bright colors and repetitive sounds, however, Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet is a genuinely entertaining, cheekily and a surprisingly philosophical examination of our digital lives.
Ralph Breaks the Internet is the sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, although there’s literally no reason why you need to watch the first one to enjoy the second. The plot to Ralph Breaks the Internet is simple: Ralph is a lumbering and lovable antagonist from an old arcade game, and his best friend is Vanellope, a tiny princess who drives a race car in a different, old arcade game. One day the steering wheel on Vanellope’s game breaks, the owner of the arcade installs wifi for the first time, one thing leads to another, and Vanellope and Ralph set off into the internet for the first time to buy a new steering wheel on eBay.
It turns out the internet is bit like New York City: It’s vibrant, dangerous, crowded, and filled with layers upon layers of content, hustlers and strivers. I won’t give away the ending here, but writer/director Rich Moore puts Vanellope and Ralph through the ringer. Their friendship gets pummeled left and right, and some hairpin turns in the plot transform what was ostensibly a kid’s movie into a meditation on the meaning of life in a digital world where free will is only part of the program.
The voice acting in Ralph Breaks the Internet is spot on, and leads John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman have a believable rapport. There’s a fantastic meta-commentary about Disney Princesses midway through the film, and it’s also a pretty good primer on how viral content is created and spread. The animation is fairly striking as well at times, and those viewers old (or young) enough to have grown up with a certain era of video games will find ample easter eggs to keep them entertained. Point is, why not take a drive down the internet super-highway (remember that old phrase?) and spend some time Ralph and Venollope tonight.
Ralph Breaks the Internet is available to stream on Netflix.
Reading List:
If you’re an opera lover, be sure to keep an eye on the Metropolitan Opera’s website. They’re doing regular streams of some of the best past productions, and while it’s not quite the same as a live performance, there is less shame if you fall asleep during the third act on your couch than if you do so in a box seat. (I love the opera, and I always wind up taking a snooze.)
Britney Spears apparently keeps a lot of tiny furniture in her home gym, and she accidentally burned it down with vanilla candles. Ah, to have the problems of a celebrity.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.