Dreams, even when remembered, fizz away like sweets dropped in lemonade when the brain switches on for the day. I think there’s probably a good reason for that.
Israeli entrepreneur Liran Goldberg doesn’t. His kickstarter pitch sought to raise $80,000 for the Sleep Project, a website designed to collect users’ dreams, subject their descriptions to a social vote, and turn the most popular candidates into a TV series.
Goldberg enthused: “How many times have you woken up from a crazy dream and thought Wow! That would make a great movie!!”
Many times, Liran. But then again, I often get that excited about starting a sandwich shop called “Baguette about it!”. It doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
A person’s dreams are never as interesting to anyone else as they are to the dreamer. That’s why we tell proper stories instead.
Upon waking, I often grip my wife like the ancient mariner stopping the wedding guest, and insist on relating twenty minutes worth of mental adventure (“you don’t understand, love – I taught a giant crab to dance!”), before realising she is only sweetly feigning interest because I seem so involved in the telling.
I certainly can’t imagine television execs being much more generous. Can you really imagine any channel agreeing to air episodes with synopses like: “I was with you and these other guys, I can’t remember who. We were in this kind of greenhouse place with a pizza buffet, and we were looking for a special rock, but it turned out the rock was actually a bucket of ants. But it was still a rock, if you know what I mean? And then we were sort of in Japan, and David Hasselhoff was trying to get the bucket off me and then I woke up”?
Of course, Goldberg’s project had a voting system to ensure only the most popular dreams would be filmed, but this creates a worse problem.
By voting the most engaging stories to the top, people would be actively selecting against honestly transcribed blurts of brainguff, in favour of stories augmented and edited in order to make the “dreamers” look like really deep and meaningful people.
All in all, the Sleep Project seems like a lot of effort to go to for the sake of a few weak stories.
If only nature had equipped us all with a machine that could not only create our own movies, tailor-made to our particular interests, from nothing, but put us inside them, surrounded by special effects budgets that would bankrupt hollywood ten times over. Oh wait, it did.
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