Avatar Movie - A Jaunt into a Lucid Dream Fantasy World

The movie featured an imagination-rich fantasy environment, filled with alien life forms, epic landscapes and awe-inspiring robotic armies. But CGI-phobes needn't worry - even without the amazing visuals, you are still left with a refreshingly non-formulaic story and a variety of interesting characters.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

But why did Avatar remind me so much of lucid dreaming? First, the story revolves around a crippled man who "goes to sleep" during which his mind is scientifically transferred into the body of a blue, 12-foot alien. In this form, he explores extraterrestrial rainforests, fights savage alien beasts, flies on the backs of dragons and battles 20-foot robot walkers in the process of saving a civilization from a tyrannical invader. The central theme of altered states of consciousness and mind separating from body adheres to the notion of our minds wandering while our bodies are asleep. A lucid dream indeed.

Inspired by Lucid Dreams

What's more, the surreal artwork of Avatar lends beautifully to many scenes favored by lucid dreamers - rainforests, waterfalls, oceans, nature - as the characters passed over them in full flight. I gobbled up these visual feasts and stored them away to re-live in my next lucid dreams. Seeing it all in 3D was even more fantastic - visually, the movie experience was rich as a lucid dream itself!

Indeed, James Cameron recently commented that his movie creation was actually inspired by lucid dreams: "I've been thinking a lot about this film and maybe why it's connected to people so much, and I've kind of realized that what I was trying to do was create dream imagery, create a lucid dream state while you're watching the film. I think that most people dream of flying at some point and when we're kids we dream of flying and I certainly did, and still have a lot of flying dreams and I thought that if I can connect to an audience, to a kind of collective unconscious in almost the Jungian sense, then it bypasses all the politics and all the bull****, and all the culturally specific stuff and all the language specific stuff around the world and connects us all to that kind of childhood, dreamlike state when the world was magical and infinite and scary and cool and you could soar. So that was the concept behind these scenes. And for me, personally, this was the part of the movie that I like the best, that I can watch over and over again."

Coming back to the ground on Pandora, the vivid forest flora gave an adrenaline shot to the imagination. But perhaps most importantly, the seamless blend of real-life actors and CGI left me with an openness to blend reality with imagination. And that, at least in part, is what lucid dreaming is about.

Final Thoughts

If you've never experienced a lucid dream, seize the opportunity to see this movie in 3D - the special edition version should cater to this. Lucid dreamers will smile as you realize the exact moment Avatar becomes lucid... It has the rush, the intensity and the newborn freedom that accompanies the onset of a lucid dream.