Watch collective:unconscious, the Acclaimed Indie Film Where 5 Filmmakers Adapt Each Other’s Dreams for the Screen

What an irony that, when you have a vivid, fun­ny, ter­ri­fy­ing, elab­o­rate dream, you dare not tell any­one for fear of bor­ing them. But what if you could let some­one else expe­ri­ence your dreams first-hand? The group of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers behind this year’s collective:unconscious (not to be con­fused with the New York artist group of almost the same name) have put their wak­ing heads togeth­er to come as close as pos­si­ble to doing just that. Daniel Patrick Car­bone, Josephine Deck­er, Lau­ren Wolk­stein, Frances Bodomo, and Lily Bald­win have cre­at­ed a port­man­teau film by adapt­ing one anoth­er’s dreams for the screen, which you can dream along with them by watch­ing free on Vimeo.

“I remem­ber back when I was a teen, watch­ing Mul­hol­land Dri­ve for the first time in the the­ater,” writes collective:unconscious’ pro­duc­er Dan Schoen­brun in an essay on the mak­ing of the film at Indiewire. “I remem­ber my mind being blown. I remem­ber think­ing, ‘Movies can do that?’ ”

David Lynch has made his name with pic­tures, Mul­hol­land Dri­ve and oth­ers, that feel dream­like in the rich­est, most haunt­ing sense of the word. But rather than a set of Lynch homages, each of the five film­mak­ers con­tribut­ing here come at the project of cin­e­ma­tiz­ing the uncon­scious expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent­ly. Some may feel just like your own dreams; oth­ers may feel noth­ing like them.

Rolling Stone sum­ma­rizes the “hyp­not­i­cal­ly sense­less” results neat­ly: “a gor­geous sketch about a wood­land sniper drifts into a Mal­ick-esque por­trait of an ex-con’s first day of free­dom; a gym teacher pre­pares his class for a vol­cano drill; a young moth­er who’s giv­ing birth to an ele­men­tal mon­ster; the grim reaper hosts a TV show about mur­dered black chil­dren.” The film has already made an impres­sive cir­cuit around the fes­ti­vals, includ­ing his year’s South by South­west (where the New York­er’s Richard Brody named it as a favorite), so clear­ly their review com­mit­tees saw some­thing much more inter­est­ing going on than the kind of recount­ing of dreams that goes on over break­fast. As they say, there’s much more going on in the uncon­scious — more of artis­tic use, any­way — than we under­stand.

collective:unconscious will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.