Sydney Morning Herald - Latest News
· collected 2026-08-26 · by John Bailey
The article is an opinion piece arguing that dream sequences in films and TV shows are often ineffective storytelling devices. Christopher Nolan is cited as avoiding dream sequences due to audience devaluation of them, and it's suggested that this is because they can feel like a "cop-out" or undoing the tension built up in a scene. The author notes that dreams are not always easily legible or symbolic, and treating them as such can be simplistic.
Written by the local model on 2026-08-26,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
How good is that bit in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey where Matt Damon skydives naked with the sexy chimp who talks just like his Grade 6 English teacher?
asserted
who → skydive → teacher
No, wait, that’s a dream I had, and I won’t bore anyone further with the grubby details.
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I → wait → details
Nobody likes to hear another person’s dream, especially my partner and children.
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Nobody → like → dream
Christopher Nolan knows that dream sequences are the worst, which is why the director famous for his flashbacks and flash-forwards and all sorts of timey-wimey shenanigans generally steers clear of sleepytime nonsense.
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director → know → nonsense
He even directed an entire film set within dreams that strenuously avoided surrealist imagery or flights of fancy.
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that → direct → fancy
This is the storytelling equivalent of waving your palms and pleading, “No, no, I take it all back!”
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I → wave → it
The irony here is that James himself could really knock out a killer dream story.
uncertain
James → knock → story
He wrote in an autobiography of “the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” in which he was chased through The Louvre by a terrible creature, the whole affair lit only by lightning.
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affair → write → lightning
But James would agree with Nolan, who recently argued that audiences “devalue” dream sequences.
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audiences → agree → sequences
How many times does a film or TV show just start to become interesting before our protagonist bolts upright amid a snarl of bedsheets, panting with relief that none of what they’ve just experienced really happened?
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they → start → what
This is the storytelling equivalent of waving your palms and pleading, “No, no, I take it all back!”
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I → wave → it
It’s like ending a chapter of your book with the line “haha not really, lol”.
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It → ’ → line
It’s a failure of commitment, undoing the very thing that is likely the dramatic highlight of your tale.
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that → ’ → tale
Rather than escalating tension and ratcheting up the stakes, it deflates whatever energy the dream sequence was supposed to generate.
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sequence → escalate → energy
Thanks to Freud and Jung, storytellers feel justified in treating our complex and jumbled inner worlds as if they were simple ciphers describing our fears and desires.
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they → feel → fears
Not everything that appears in our dreams represents something at the core of our psyche.
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that → appear → psyche
Freud was forced to remind us that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as I’ve been forced to remind my partner and children that sometimes a naked skydive with your Grade 6 English teacher is perfectly innocent.
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skydive → force → teacher
I can already hear the cinephiles unsheathing their poison pens, so let me issue a caveat: I’m not against stories that are dream-like.
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that → hear → stories
In fact, they’re some of the best.
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they → ’re → best
The films of directors as diverse as Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, Sofia Coppola and Lynne Ramsay all possess a dreamlike weightlessness, even though they’re grounded in the waking world.
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they → possess → world
Henry James himself pulled off the same trick with his classic The Turn of the Screw, in which the boundary between the real and the imagined is never resolved.
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boundary → pull → real
Then there’s David Lynch, whose art was almost entirely defined by dream logic but who rarely stooped to anything as low as an actual dream sequence.
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who → ’ → sequence
From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, dreams and reality overlap to the point that there’s little difference.
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dreams → overlap → point
Lynch often said that our partial, fragmented perception of existence means that we all essentially live inside our own private dream.
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we → say → dream
His films, then, were dreams within a dream, and that’s a phrase that a whole bunch of his characters would repeat across his work.
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bunch → ’ → work
If a film is already a fantasy, then why not go the whole hog and commit?
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film → go → hog
How much more compelling is it to happen upon the moment in a story that has you thinking, “This can’t be happening, not really”, only to gradually realise that yes, we’re going there, and you won’t believe what happens next, too.
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what → happen → story
No need to tell us it was just a dream all along.
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it → tell → us
- Femme fatale: Why killer women are better than boring alpha men
- Nice guys finish first: Why this film is criminally underrated
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film → finish → men
Binge-watching: Short seasons are ruining TV; bring back the 22-episode season
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seasons → ruin → season
Mr Beast: The billionaire YouTube star is a charisma black hole, and I respect it
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I → respect → it
