I dreamt Inland Empire before watching it

I’ll start by saying when I had my dream I had no idea what Inland Empire was about aside from a film was being made. I have been working through Lynch's catalogue - Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks (1-2 + FWWM) and most recently Wild At Heart.

I had been thinking about Inland Empire but it sounded daunting and I wanted to be in an appropriate headspace. The following entries were both written before and after watching Inland Empire.

The Dream

I woke from a dream (3:20 am as I wrote an initial stream of consciousness draft of this post) and I feel like what I experienced is exactly what the film is going to be like, from what I understand about the film - dream logic, absurdity, surrealism, vague connections and references all jumbled together that seem to make some sense in the dream but when looked at objectively from an awake reference just seem weird. E.g. I watched Wild At Heart for the first time a few days ago so lots of this dream-film contained Laura Dern as she was in the film. There were also time jumps, spontaneous location changes, familiar characters (I’m pretty sure Harry Dean Stanton was in it but more like his character in Paris Texas which I also watched recently), and references to other film franchises (at one point I was in a petrol station and a big muscle car drove in that looked like something out of Mad Max Fury Road, but instead of flames, bubbles were coming out the exhaust and I was blinded as I tried to navigate my way past). There were even 2 versions of Laura Dern’s character that were chasing me at various points.

At one point it was as if I was viewing only a single frame of the film, there was writing on the pavement outside a shop front and it was as if I were looking on Reddit and people were showing that they had visited the real-life filming location - I had created BTS content. It’s like my brain was working all of these points together. The fact that I watched Wild At Heart the night before then makes perfect sense that Laura Dean was in my film-dream. Similarly to when Lynch works with the same people and frequently depicts Hollywood, people we know frequently appear in our dreams as semi-fictionalised versions of their real selves.

At one point I woke up and thought there was a cat at the end of my bed (I don’t have a cat so it was a scary thought) but then a minute or so later that thought was absurd and quickly dismissed in my head as waking up from REM sleep. Thinking a cat was on my bed filled me with terror for some reason but it seemed perfectly rational at the time, as is often the case with dreams.

All the while experiencing this my semi-conscious mind was under the impression I was watching Inland Empire. I was confused, disoriented, a little scared but there were strands everywhere that felt familiar, as dreams often are. But it all felt real and had its own set of rules and type of sense when experiencing it at the time.

What I’m trying to get at is that I feel like I’ve already experienced Inland Empire, in its purist form - directly from subconscious thought. I like Lynch’s work and his more cerebral expressions (from the limited catalogue I’ve watched) so I’m curious to see what Inland Empire will actually be like and whether this “pre-viewing” will affect my first watch.

I’m hoping this can help me to appreciate some of Lynch’s more “inaccessible” works now that I’ve experienced one of his projects in my own brain that can’t be replicated and will vanish from my mind very shortly. I almost just went back to bed but I felt compelled to write down my thoughts before they vanished into the aether.

There’s a lot to unpack and I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface with what I have experienced, in terms of how it relates to media-literacy, Lynch’s work but also how my own mind operates. I couldn’t possibly put it all into words either, so much of what we dream and feel is just an emotional resonance or intense feeling that would lose all meaning if put into words.

After watching Inland Empire

“I don’t know what happened first. And it’s kinda laid a mind fuck on me.”

I have had a night to sleep, digest the film and read people's thoughts on the film's literal story but also its wider meaning. For now I'm going to just let myself sit with what I experienced, critical analysis can wait until further viewings.

What I will say is that I really appreciated the filming style - the handheld camcorder gave it a real low budget fell that instantly put me on edge. I love a good story-in-a-story so this really tickled me and then the further 4th wall breaking or meta-narrative that was going on with Laura Dern literally watching the film itself. Speaking of Laura Dern - WOW!

I don't think I would have appreciated Inland Empire without first having such an intense dream the night before, it really put me in the right mind-frame to allow myself to just enjoy the ride without searching for coherency or logical storytelling that I'm used to. Whether you call it a film or just experimental art, it's going to stay with me for a long time.

Has anyone else had a similar epiphany regarding their own dreams and Lynch’s work?