“Watch and Listen to the Dream of Time and Space” – on the phenomenology of the oneiric in the films of David Lynch

Abstract

There is hardly a contemporary film director whose name is as closely linked to the dream(-like) as that of David Lynch. Both popular and academic discourse frequently identify Lynch’s films by their dreamlike qualities. However, in the existing literature on Lynch, these qualities tend to remain underspecified in terms of their experiential dimension. Departing from an interest in the phenomenon of dream experience, this is the first systematic book-length study exploring the nature and function of the oneiric in the director’s different phases and audio-visual formats. It shows that, over the course of 50 years, Lynch has developed a cinematic aesthetics of the oneiric ‒ an ensemble of four dream-related dimensions that unfolds its full potential in the dynamic interplay between sensory address and reflective medialization. On the one hand, what I call the Lynchian oneiric presents a markedly sensory-perceptual mode of experience – both characters and viewers are challenged in their perceptual patterns, while at the same time being immersed in the material dream scenario. On the other hand, the Lynchian oneiric provides a mode of both psychological and medial reflection. Not only the characters, but the films themselves are inclined to ‘turn back’ on themselves in a dream, exploring the preconditions, possibilities, and limitations of their own existence and ability to know the world. The oneiric in Lynch’s films is thus of phenomenological, media-theoretical, and philosophical interest.