TRILOGY OF DREAM
About the Trilogy of Dream
Made in 1994, 1999 and 2017 respectively, the three films by Kal Ng explore 3 different aspects of dreaming, namely dream as clairvoyance; dream as a form of lucidity and dream as premonition.
Dream as been an age old subject since the dawn of human culture, from mythic roots to shamanism, from psychoanalysis to modern technology, dream has been playing a part in the evolving human civilisation. Kal Ng, being a young filmmaker in 1994, whose family moved from Hong Kong to Toronto, Canada near the end of the 1980s, had the chance to make his first 16mm feature films that centred on the subject of the 'end of the world', and within this topic lies the idea of “little dreams” of the people living in cities or major urban areas of our world, which is claimed by the Stories of Chide the Wind - The Soul Investigators to be gradually forgotten or fading away. The first film is an inspired form of the American Indian myths, in their parable and poetic like narrative. The film describes how when the little dreams of the people disappear, the end of the world will come. Chide the Wind is a character similar to Dances with Wolves, a name given to a journalist turned mystic or guru, who specializes in collecting the stories relating to the disappearance of the “little dreams”. Thus his stories are forms of clairvoyances.
The second film Dreamtrips, make in the year 1999, deals with the idea of a how the interiority of the human dreamworld is rendered and make concrete for experience by human dreamtrippers with technology. Coincide with the phenomenon of The Matrix Trilogy by the Warchowsky brothers (1999-2003), the idea of human experience that can be manufactured by manipulation of the human brain begins to take popular hold of the movie goers' imagination. The idea of Dreamtrips is instead an imaginative twist based on similar idea: instead of the computer fabricating the physical world for people to experience, the dreamworld is constructed by computer based on human dream activities, these dreamworlds are then interpreted as territory of the human psyche that contains secrets and signs, the dream-trippers desires and unresolved conflicts of the daily life. This inside - out idea of probing the inner workings of dream are more alluded to the idea in the film Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan, and also the established scientific research of lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is indeed aware that he/she is dreaming and is capable in altering the contents of his/her dreams and that in turn have affective consequence to the waking life of the dreamer, as if the life history or memories of the person is being rewritten. Therefore Dreamtrips deals with the idea of dream as a form of lucidity to our psyche and our inner life, our hopes and fears and aspirations.
After 17 years, Kal Ng finally come up with the third idea about dream, that is the nature of predicting the future. This nature of the dream has been the stuffs of many stories and records, even in the Bible, dream as fore-telling a certain future is often mentioned. However Kal Ng hopes to illustrate this powerful nature in a poetic way instead of a dramatic way and has come up with the story of Nirvenue, in which a young man encounters his many duplicated / programmed selves in the computer and begins to experience and discover the consequences of what the computing age has finally bring about to human civilisation. 40 years after the personal computing revolution, on the cusp of a true new age, 17 years into the millennium, the fear of the end of the world has finally subsided and we are facing a thrilling future with new ideas: quantum computing, space travel, multiple universes, wars of terror, virtual life, smartphones and trans-humanism, the dream as premonition is a soothsaying about the transformed reality we are entering now.