Animals were harmed in these films
In a complex plot, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief with the rare ability to enter his victim's dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious. In one scene, Paris is folded on itself, an effect created using awesome computer-generated imagery.
In this Hollywood classic, Dorothy (Judy Garland) gets knocked out by a flying window during the Kansas tornado scene. She lands in Oz, where her fantasy adventures begins. At the end of the movie, she wakes up in bed with her family surrounding her. In the original book, 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' by L. Frank Baum, published in 1900, there is no dream.
Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arrives at a house party in the English countryside. Despite having never previously met any of them, he realizes he has seen each of the assembled guests in a recurring dream. Furthermore, he can predict events in the house before they unfold. The film then follows the revelers as they each tell him tales of their own dreams and encounters with the supernatural.
This film noir crime thriller stars Edward G. Robinson and Kevin McCarthy. Stan (McCarthy) wakes up in his bed convinced he has murdered somebody in a mirrored room. Desperate for answers, he turns to his brother-in-law Rene (Robinson), who is a detective. The cop finds out that a killing did indeed take place in a room full of mirrors, and Stan immediately falls under suspicion.
Director David Lynch takes his audience through what appears to a dream in which two women (Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring) meet in an apartment. Both are aspiring young actresses, but one has just survived a car accident and can't remember anything about the wreck. Then reality kicks in to reveal the horrifying truth. This is Lynch at his enigmatic best.
This ethereal piece of cinema is the work of Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. She also wrote the screenplay, which revolves around Mária (Alexandra Borbély) and Endre (Géza Morcsányi), both of whom work at a slaughterhouse. They soon realize that they've been sharing the same recurring dream, where Mária becomes a doe and Endre a stag searching for food in a forest carpeted in snow.
Italian director Federico Fellini's cinematic masterpiece features two iconic dream sequences. The movie's opening scene follows Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) as he escapes a suffocating traffic jam by soaring high over Italy. Later, he's seen in a fantasy world lording over a harem of women from his life.
Curtis (Michael Shannon) is tormented by apocalyptic dreams about a gathering storm. His anxiety is heightened further after experiencing a series of harrowing visual and auditory hallucinations of cutting rain, flocks of menacing birds, and being harmed by people close to him. Are his nightmares real, and should he shelter his family from the impending tempest?
Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame directs this dystopic and totalitarian view of an urban future inhabited by one Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), who embarks on a quest to try and find a woman who appears in his dreams. Along the way he treads a perilous path through baffling technocracy, stifling bureaucracy, and sinister hyper-surveillance.
Known in English as 'Wild Strawberries,' Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's celebrated tale of an elderly man named Isak (Victor Sjöström) recalling his past is imparted to audiences through a series of dreams and nightmares as he embarks on a road trip to collect a degree awarded to him by a university. He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law, and along the way meets a series of hitchhikers.
The monastic "Brotherhood of Sleep" communicate through dreams, but pretty soon they're screaming out loud after the discovery of an ancient cylinder of fluid that turns out be the liquid embodiment of Satan. John Carpenter's supernatural horror stars Donald Pleasence.
Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg head the cast in this Franco-Italian surrealistic fantasy, which translates into English as 'The Science of Sleep.' Stéphane Miroux (Bernal) is increasingly entranced by his vivid dreams to the point where they begin to overlap with reality. He invites Stéphanie (Gainsbourg) to share in them.
'Wayne's World 2' briefly takes audiences into the realms of fantasy after Wayne (Mike Meyers) has a dream in which he meets Jim Morrison and a mysterious semi-naked Native American Indian in a desert.
Legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was inspired by his own dreams to direct this magical realist movie. It's composed of eight vignettes, with each variously exploring themes such as childhood, spirituality, art, and death. Kurosawa's reputation was such that Hollywood A-list names George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese were all happy to assist in the film's production.
'Open Your Eyes,' to give this Spanish production its English title, follows César (Eduardo Noriega), a young man who is horribly disfigured in a car crash and has to wear a prosthetic mask. The trauma induces a series of disorientating experiences, where fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream. César's love interest Sofía (Penélope Cruz) and former girlfriend Nuria (Najwa Nimri) are the women having to deal with the consequences of his fate. The film was remade in 2001 as 'Vanilla Sky' starring Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz, reprising her role from the original film.
All the films in this franchise deal with dreams, with Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) seen early on in each experiencing some type of sleep state. In 1999's 'The Matrix,' humanity is unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, a realm in which Neo slips in and out of in a series of nightmarish scenarios.
Alfred Hitchcock's masterful psychological thriller is noted for an extraordinary dream sequence conceived by Hitchcock and Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who subsequently designed the set (pictured). Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck star.
The origins of German Expressionism in film can be traced back to this silent classic 1920 horror film, directed by Robert Wiene. A hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, uses a somnambulist (sleepwalker) called Cesare to commit murders. The sinister theme is heightened by the film's dark and twisted visual style, the jagged architecture lending the production a fantastic and graphic veneer.
This Franco-Spanish silent short made by Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí is composed of a highly symbolic series of images, and uses dream logic, or dream interpretation, to create something of a narrative flow. The audience is left to wonder whether any of it makes sense, but dreams are often vague in their meaning, are they not? By the way, the title in English reads as 'An Andalusian Dog.'
Sources: (StudioBinder) (The Guardian) (Britannica)
See also: Famous films set in the desert
What has caused the crew of an spaceship orbiting a planet called Solaris to go insane? Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's seminal science fiction film deals with concepts of lost memories and psychological traumas. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to investigate. Upon boarding the vessel, he is to shocked to see an apparition of Hari, his wife, who long ago took her own life. Is it a dream, or is his mind playing cruel and disturbing games?
To flatline is to lose your heartbeat. In this movie, a bunch of medical students conduct clandestine experiments on each other that produce near-death experiences. The afterlife is interpreted as a series of dreams each has before being resuscitated. Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland are among those discovering what's beyond.
Bad dreams and nightmares are induced by drug addiction in this psychological drama starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Connelly. Director Darren Aronofsky creates a world of delusion, desperation, and despair.
This fantasy drama examines the afterlife. Chris (Robin Williams), who after dying in a car accident, wakes up in a heaven he has created with his imagination. In a terrible twist, his heartbroken wife later takes her own life out of grief over the loss. Chris then decides to embark on an afterlife adventure to reunite with her.
Musician Gary Shaller (Martin Freeman) is experiencing lucid dreams about a woman named Anna (Penélope Cruz), with whom he is deeply infatuated. Intrigued and alarmed in equal measure, he decides to read up about lucid dreaming, which occurs when the dreamer is conscious. Imagine his shock when he learns that Anna actually exists!
Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) has no idea why she is suddenly seeing visions of a murdered child. She's even more alarmed after experiencing psychic connections to a serial killer. The situation worsens when Claire starts having bizarre dreams about a strange underwater city and another killing of a youngster. She believes her dreaming is premonitory and, to her absolute horror, she is ultimately proved correct.
Director Richard Linklater's animated experimental feature was originally shot on film and then digitally rotoscoped, where a team of artists illustrated over it. The result is an extraordinary dreamlike canvas on which Picasso-type people and buildings hover and levitate through scenes in imaginative free fall. Linklater himself makes a brief appearance (pictured) among a wide range of actors and non-actors seen on film and rotoscoped.
Directed by Luis Buñuel, this French-language film known in English as 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' examines the dreams and the dreams-within-dreams of a privileged yet spoiled group of bourgeoise friends, who gather for a dinner party only to have their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption exposed.
"Sleep kills" is the warning written across the movie poster publicizing Wes Craven's supernatural slasher. 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' is cited by many critics as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It triumphs because when all the cutting and screaming is over, it's still a tale about the prospect of a killer who strikes when we're at our most vulnerable and defenseless.
Paul Verhoeven's acclaimed science fiction movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid/ Carl Hauser, who experiences recurring dreams about Mars and a mysterious woman. But has the dream been implanted as a vacation memory, or did he really visit the red planet and meet up with the unknown female?
Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) is a woman unfulfilled. Husband Bill (Tom Cruise) is unaware of her dreamy fantasies, which involve numerous men. Angry and confused, he embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey that leads him to a remote country mansion and a secret—and sinister—sexual orgy. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was Stanley Kubrick's final film: the director died while the film was still in post-production.
Dreams are made up of a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations best described as stories that our mind creates while we sleep. Dreams can transport us into magical and enchanting places, full of adventure and excitement. But they can also take us into the dark world of the nightmare, a sinister realm of fear, anxiety, and terror that often induces an awakened state of panic. No wonder filmmakers have been preoccupied with dreams since the early days of cinema!
In this gallery, click through and drift off into some of moviedom's greatest films about dreams.
Wake up to the best movies about dreams
Open your eyes and take a look of these dreamy pictures
MOVIES Cinema
Dreams are made up of a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations best described as stories that our mind creates while we sleep. Dreams can transport us into magical and enchanting places, full of adventure and excitement. But they can also take us into the dark world of the nightmare, a sinister realm of fear, anxiety, and terror that often induces an awakened state of panic. No wonder filmmakers have been preoccupied with dreams since the early days of cinema!
In this gallery, click through and drift off into some of moviedom's greatest films about dreams.