I love Rebecca Turner’s site, but unlike you guys hadn’t made the connection between the movie and lucid dreaming up until now. Interestingly enough though, Dr. Stephen LaBerge just visited us at Stanford Sleep and Dreams and did in fact mention Avatar in a tangential way. That connection is a lot clearer now after reading your piece, and will stay in my mind for a while. Hey, maybe I’ll even try to go to Pandora tonight in my sleep.

Well done mate,

Kevin Morton
“A dream is real while it lasts–can we say more of life?”

Seth – I agree, the Matrix trilogy takes the cake symbolically, altho my favorite will always be the 1st.

and even Wizard of Oz hits on this theme — the imaginal world and its ties to the sometimes dreary reality of, um, Kansas cornfields.

The best of these movies (archetypally speaking) is the Matrix (as a full trilogy), which actually shows spiritual laws at work. Less well-done are movies like Surrogates and Strange Days which tend to explore materialistic consequences and are less ‘aware’ of archetypal connections. Movies like “Waking Life” are more middle of the road, in this regard.

The instant I put those glasses on and became immersed in Pandora I couldn’t help but draw similarities to LDs. Not necessarily the design of the world, but the actual way his conscious awareness was ‘plugged’ into the brain of his Avatar. It was a technology that for me didn’t need explanation… it almost made sense.

I have noticed a new trend with hollywood of late… that of a storyline that involves the mind being plugged into another world… Avatar obviously. Another is ‘Surrogates’… and recently the prequel to Battlestar Galactica, ‘Caprica’ in which people can don strange eye-wear and be thrust into a virtual world. Of course there are older movies like ‘Strangedays’… I could go as far as to add ‘The Matrix’.

I came out of the cinema after Avatar with two thoughts on my mind… the first was “Damn… I got to get my film made” and the second… “we can already do this, without technology”

Also, reminds me that many Native American cultures do not make the separation either. For instance, in Navajo, “inhabla” can mean waking-vision or sleeping dream.

There is a lot of useful information for anthropologists in this article.

Your reference to Papua, New Guinea ethnography made me go back to re-read an interesting 1995 paper in the Anthrop. of Consciousness journal. In it, the Marianne George notes that the Barok people of New Ireland, Papua, New Guinea “define dreams as both sleeping and waking experiences….”

Narratives of four dream and dreamlike experiences are reported. One of them is about some instructions sent to the anthropologist by a woman whom she knew, after the sender had expired. I have read comparable reports from present day Egypt. In Egypt, the senders of instructions from the grave were “saints”.

The grouping of certain sleeping and waking experiences into a single category among the Barok is also a reminder of parallels in the Islamic world. Questions about not distinguishing between “dream” and “vision” by Muslim peoples have been raised in English language writings. In Arabic apparently the same word can be used for a dream as well for a vision (hallucination?). George does not indicate whether the Barok also use the same term to describe sleeping and waking experiences.