Meaning of a Dream

Last week I saw James Cameron's movie-of-the-year, Avatar in 3D. I'd seen the trailer and thought it looked cool, but other than that had no major expectations. I certainly didn't anticipate the quality of the virtual reality world to remind me so vividly of my favorite lucid dreams.

Besides the occasional sense of motion sickness, watching Avatar in 3D was an immersing experience. It showcased the speed at which entertainment technology is developing, making me wonder how far are we from creating a Matrix-quality virtual reality world.

The movie featured an awe-inspiring fantasy environment, filled with alien life forms, epic landscapes and robotic armies. But CGI-phobes needn't worry - even without the complex visuals, Avatar still has an engaging storyline.

But why did Avatar remind me so much of lucid dreaming?

First, the story revolves around a crippled man who goes to sleep during which his mind is scientifically transferred out of body and into a blue, 12-foot alien.

In this form, he explores extraterrestrial rainforests, fights savage alien beasts, flies on the backs of dragons and battles 20-foot robot walkers in the process of saving a civilization from a tyrannical invader.

The central theme of altered states of consciousness and mind separating from body adheres to the notion of our minds wandering while our bodies are asleep. A lucid dream indeed.

What's more, the surreal artwork of Avatar lends beautifully to many scenes favored by lucid dreamers - rainforests, waterfalls and oceans - as the characters passed over them in full flight. I gobbled up these visual feasts and stored them away to re-live in my lucid dreams.

Indeed, James Cameron recently commented that his movie creation was actually inspired by lucid dreams:

"I've been thinking a lot about this film and maybe why it's connected to people so much, and I've kind of realized that what I was trying to do was create dream imagery, create a lucid dream state while you're watching the film.

"I think that most people dream of flying at some point and when we're kids we dream of flying and I certainly did, and still have a lot of flying dreams and I thought that if I can connect to an audience, to a kind of collective unconscious in almost the Jungian sense, then it bypasses all the politics and all the bull****, and all the culturally specific stuff and all the language specific stuff around the world and connects us all to that kind of childhood, dreamlike state when the world was magical and infinite and scary and cool and you could soar. So that was the concept behind these scenes. And for me, personally, this was the part of the movie that I like the best, that I can watch over and over again."

Coming back to the ground on Pandora, the vivid forest flora gave an adrenaline shot to the imagination. But perhaps most importantly, the seamless blend of real-life actors and CGI left me with an openness to blend reality with imagination. And that, at least in part, is what lucid dreaming is about.

If you've never experienced a lucid dream before, this out-of-body movie offers a taste of the visual intensity you might expect. Lucid dreamers will smile as it becomes clear the exact moment Avatar becomes lucid... It has the euphoric rush of liberation that accompanies the onset of a lucid dream.