Dream sequences are among the most tempting tools in a screenwriter's kit — and, according to a growing critical consensus, among the most misused. Whether it's a protagonist jolting awake in a tangle of sweaty sheets or a Freudian montage of symbols parading across the screen, the dream sequence has become one of storytelling's most reliable disappointments. So why do films and television shows keep reaching for it?
The Problem With Dream Sequences on Screen
The core failure of most dream sequences is one of commitment. A story begins to build genuine tension, the stakes are rising — and then the character wakes up. Everything that just happened is retroactively cancelled. It is, as one reading of the device suggests, the storytelling equivalent of throwing your hands up and saying "No, no, I take it all back." Rather than escalating drama, the reveal that it was all a dream deflates whatever energy the sequence was supposed to generate.
There is also the persistent tendency to treat dreams as tidy, readable puzzles. Influenced by the theories of Freud and Jung, storytellers have long felt justified in presenting the inner world as a simple cipher — a procession of symbols that neatly map onto a character's deepest fears or desires. The result is predictable and reductive. As Freud himself was compelled to acknowledge, not every image carries profound psychological weight. Sometimes, a symbol is just a symbol.
Christopher Nolan is among the directors who have argued that audiences actively "devalue" dream sequences. It is a view that shapes his own practice: despite being a filmmaker obsessed with fractured timelines and non-linear storytelling, Nolan has largely avoided the device. His film Inception — set almost entirely within dreams — is a telling case study. Rather than embracing surrealism or visual abstraction, its dreamscapes look and feel closer to an ordinary working day than to anything genuinely oneiric.
When Dreamlike Storytelling Actually Works
The distinction worth drawing is between a dream sequence and a dreamlike film — and the difference is enormous. Some of the most powerful cinema ever made possesses a dreamy, weightless quality without ever resorting to the literal device. Directors as varied as Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, Sofia Coppola and Lynne Ramsay achieve this atmosphere while remaining rooted in the waking world.
Australia's own Picnic at Hanging Rock is a prime example — a film that operates like a shared reverie, evoking the strange, oppressive beauty of the colonial landscape as experienced by young women with no foothold in it. Its power comes precisely from the fact that nothing is labelled a dream; the uncanny is allowed to breathe.
Henry James, to whom the writing maxim "tell a dream, lose a reader" is sometimes attributed, understood this intuitively. His novella The Turn of the Screw sustains its grip by never resolving the boundary between the real and the imagined — a far more unsettling effect than any literal dream sequence could produce. The irony is that James himself wrote vividly about his own dreams, including a celebrated nightmare set in the Louvre, pursued by a monstrous figure through corridors lit only by lightning.
David Lynch and the Dream That Never Ends
No filmmaker made the case more forcefully — or more successfully — than David Lynch, whose entire body of work was shaped by dream logic yet rarely stooped to an actual dream sequence. From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, the boundary between sleeping and waking dissolves so completely that the question of which is which becomes irrelevant.
Lynch held that human perception is inherently partial and fragmented — that we all, in a sense, inhabit our own private dream. His films, then, were dreams within dreams. It is a phrase that recurs throughout his work, and it points to the real opportunity that lazy dream sequences squander: the chance to commit fully to a reality that unsettles, disorients and refuses to apologise for itself.
When a story makes a viewer think "this cannot really be happening" — and then holds its nerve — the effect is far more potent than any bolt-upright-in-bed reveal. The best filmmakers have always known this. The question is whether the rest of the industry is finally ready to wake up to it.
