Dune Dreams
Transcript
Welcome to Dream Auguries. Tonight, we're going to spend some time in the dream world of Frank Herbert's Dune and Denis Villeneuve's screen adaptation. We're calling this segment: Dreams within Dreams. Don't worry: if you haven't read the novel or seen the film, that shouldn't be a problem, we're going to talk about dreams as a driver of stories.
"Dreams are messages from the deep." These words open Villeneuve's film. The words appear on-screen as subtitles to the basso profoundo of the alien Sardaukar language being spoken. "Dreams are messages from the deep."
What I find interesting about this opening is that the director Villeneuve is extremely faithful to the text of Herbert's novel in all other ways. The storyline, the set design, the character descriptions are remarkably true to the book. But he chooses to open the film by telling us: "Dreams are messages from the deep." A line that is NOT in the novel.
Villeneuve is setting us up right from the outset that in this film -- a medium like dreams -- there are messages from the deep we need to pay attention to. Indeed in the book and the movie dreams play a significant role in giving GLIMPSES of the future.
Frank Herbert wrote Dune in 1965 -- and many of the ecological issues raised in the book -- of a planet depleted of water -- have an eerie prescience today.
Herbert, was raised a Catholic and likely heard the dream stories from the Bible. In Genesis, Joseph, son of Jacob, has a dream and shares it with his brothers who will ultimately steal his coat and abandon him, naked, in a dry well. "Here comes the dreamer," his brothers sneer.
Joseph is a figure not only featured in Hebrew and Christian texts, but he has a significant place in the Qu'ran as well.
Herbert converted to Buddhism later in life and he based much of his writing about the Dune planet Arrakis and its people, upon Islamic traditions and Bedouin tribes of the Middle East.
Not only do the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam describe dreams of major teachers, Buddhism and Hinduism also have traditions of dream interpretation. In one text called the Supina Sutta, the Bodhissatva has a series of FIVE dreams in which he becomes the Buddha. In the second, the Bodhissatva dreams: "a woody vine grew out of his navel and stood reaching to the sky: this second great dream appeared to let him know that when he had awakened to the noble eightfold path, that he would proclaim."
Why spend this much time on dreams and dream interpretation from religious texts? Because both the novelist, Frank Herbert, and the director, Villeneuve, are going about the business of telling a story that reads as a religious (or if you prefer, spiritual) text.
Dune was created as a religious text, the telling of a story about a Messiah, so the dreams described are like those dreams from religious texts from around the world. That is, they are glimpses of the future. Or perhaps openings to an inner sense of a prophet or Messiah's destiny.
Partway through Dune, Herbert wrote an epigram at the start of one chapter. He called it a "Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain" from "Songs of Muad-Dib" by Princess Irulan (whom we have yet to meet). The dirge reads:
Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.
Dune, the novel and the movie, is a dark, dirge to be sure.
In my own movie, Dreaming Grand Avenue (now available for streaming on Amazon Prime and for rental on iTunes), the character, Jimmy K., likens dreams to signposts that might help us understand if we are moving in the right -- or wrong -- direction.
The question I'd like to leave with you tonight is: "Do you wrestle with dreams?"
Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles, soothsayers, magicians and conjurers of all kinds. It's bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, now streaming on cable, written and directed by Hugh Schulze.
Our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott Green and sound design by Kevin O’Rourke.
Good night.