Remember the movie Coraline? That's right, the stop-motion about the girl and her world of creepy button-eyed friends and family. I recently watched it again with my little sisters, and I found some striking similarities between the film and lucid dreaming. So here it is: a list of similarities between Coraline and lucid dreaming:
A List of Similarities Between Coraline and Lucid Dreaming
1. When Coraline goes to bed, she "wakes up" in the exact same room; the only difference is that the doll-sized door doesn't have a wall of bricks blocking it. Coraline essentially has a false awakening. As I explained in my last post, a false awakening is when the sleeper thinks she has woken up but is really still in an impeccably detailed dream. As I interpreted the beginning of the film, Coraline only dreamed of her button-eyed reality, but she never experienced it in real life.
That brings me to the question of: does it matter if we're dreaming? Dreams seem very real when we're in them; it's only after we wake up that we realize anything was strange (quote from someone on the Internet). For all we know, our "reality" is just a single, elaborate dream. In that case, life is merely a dream, and death is reality. Dreams won't impact the fact that we are still alive, just like life won't impact the fact that we will be dead. Dreams are simply memories, and once we die, life will be but a memory as well. Both memories from dreams and life can affect the way we behave if we choose to let them.
2. Coraline gets whatever she wants in her dream to an extent (AKA semi-lucid dreaming). In Coraline's dream, she seems to be getting everything she wants: her dad can play music, her mom cooks great food, and Wybie's mouth is forever shut. However, Coraline doesn't understand that she is fully in control of her dream, so she thinks that her "Other Mother" is in charge. When someone is only semi-lucid, she does not know how to control her dream. Semi-lucidity is perfectly illustrated in the film when Coraline and the black cat walk past the house into a blank existence. Coraline could easily imagine some other location, but since she doesn't realize that she is in a dream (false awakening), she believes that the Other Mother has trapped her in her Other Home.
3. No one else is aware of Coraline's dream. Although Coraline experiences incredible events in her illusion, these events are are only happening in her dream; they are personal, and no one else is aware of them. Even when her parents are "trapped" in the Detroit snow globe, they have no recollection of the Other World once Coraline wakes up. Coraline imagines that the snow melts off of their clothes before they can see the evidence of the dream, which is her way of reasoning the events in the Other World with reality. In this sense, Coraline wasn't really in a lucid dream; however, the amount of clarity and lapse between illusion and reality absolutely compares to that of lucidity.
Wybie was the only other real person who saw the Other Mother's metal hand, but I think this is a phenomenon called "dreamscaping." I'm not going to get into that concept since I'm not very educated on it, but since he saw the hand in the middle of the night, plus since Coraline went to sleep and then "woke up" (probably in a false awakening), it is likely that the two of them could have been interacting with each other in the same dream.
4. This isn't exactly a comparison between the two subjects, but I thought that the movie outlined very well the contrast between dreams and reality. Coraline's Other Mother seemed to have created a perfect world for Coraline, but soon after our protagonist discovers this new world, we find that the deceptive Other Mother had ulterior motives. A few days ago, I was having a crisis about fully knowing whether waking reality is actually a dream. Dreams seem normal when we have them, so what's to say that dreams aren't reality and that reality isn't just an illusion? Coraline highlighted the differences perfectly: 1) Reality has rules, and 2) Reality is for everybody (dreams are for the individual). Even if reality is just one complex illusion, at least it has rules that 7 billion people have to live with.
So there's my list! On a side note, I thought it was interesting that Coraline's name has an "o" in it instead of an "a." All of Coraline's real neighbors thought it was strange that her name was "Coraline" rather than "Caroline," but her dream neighbors thought it sounded perfectly normal. This got me to thinking that Coraline was meant to live in the Other World after all. Or it was just a clever way to emphasize Coraline's seclusion and why she would be so tempted to stay in the Other World in the first place. (Also, my sister noticed at the very last few seconds of the movie that Coraline and her family's real garden is in the shape of her Other Mother's face. Creepy.)
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