Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may fall into this category. It has more to do with memory, but it takes place while he's sleeping, he can't undo it and it causes a cycle of emotional pain.
Now that I've subscribed to your channel I'm gonna dig thru and see if you did a video on The Man Who Folded Himself, I read it like 40 years ago at the public library when I was 12, I don't remember who wrote it but it was the guy who created Land of the Lost, a great kid's TV show that "snuck in" a buncha great adult sci-fi concepts to little kids in the 70's.
That was written by David Gerrold of "Trouble with Tribbles" fame. I don't think that he created "Land of the Lost" but he was the story editor, and he wrote a lot of their episodes.
There's a chapter in the fourth Tournament of Psionic Murder novel where a psionic assassin places people into guided dreams where he tries to make them kill each other, while they think they're killing different people- it's just one chapter, not a whole novel about that but I guess it fits the trope. A really great series too
i actually am about to read lathe of heaven and this video drops 😻 i like the murakami strangeness of hardboiled wonderland. i kind of wish that he wrote more SF. his surreal idiosyncrasy is perfect for SF imho. the shows "severance" and the abruptly cancelled "1899" come to mind.
I love Murakami, and HBWSTEOTW sits in my memory as one of his best, though it is many years since I read it. I suppose we all have our subjective sub-categories, but I always connected that book with Iain Banks’s Walking On Glass. Lathe of Heaven is also a favourite. Love what you are doing with this channel. I have always enjoyed the weird books which sit in these liminal spaces.
Thanks for watching! Just found out a new translation of HBWATEOTW has a new translation coming out in September of this year. I'll be announcing it on the channel update this week!
Not sure, but I think Paprika is based on a Japanese novel. Can't wait to see what new finds get added to this list; I hope, though, you spend more time on literature than film. I think it's awesome when a group comes together and joins in the labor (and it is a form of labor) of finding books and stories in this subgenre. And it's just fun. I never would have found (K)night of Delusions had it not been for this channel. Cheers.
"it is enough to have the strength and knowledge to raise our dream machines into the sky" :) I was reminded of Laibach's rendition of B Mashina. Also, in Planescape: Torment (the video game) I think there is a dream machine somewhere. The mere concept of a dream machine is evocative, I think.
Falling water is worth a watch, dreamers cults around the dreaming, green sneakers. Only watched the first series. But they are charging for it now on prime. Maybe free in the states.
I'll add a recommend for: 🕯 Pan Sagittarius by Ian Wallace which is book 3 in a series, "croyd spacetime maneuvres" might be more Mind Expanding than Bending, your millage may vary ;-)
If you get a chance please watch 'Legion'. There are mind-bending shows and then there's Legion. Another great trippy show is Doom Patrol. Love your channel, keep up the great work.
@@LiminalSpaces03 Grant Morrison's run with 'Doom Patrol' is one of my favorites and it introduced me to writers like William S Burroughs and Jorge Luis Borges who were mind-bending in their own way. Great choice. I hope you like Legion.
I think your three points are perfect for the books you have on the table there and that those are exemplifications of the sub genre. I think it is important to keep that in mind as an anchor point when talking about other things like UBIK and Total Recall since they don’t exactly satisfy the three points but still have elements of them. Inception does satisfy these three points but instead of it being a direct therapy like the Dream Master, it uses the subconscious element to reveal a character’s weakness which eventually facilitates their healing.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch may qualify more so than Ubiq. Not exactly a dream machine but drug-induced virtual reality. I guess I wouldn’t be too concerned with keeping it super narrow about it. Manipulating the subconscious seems about right.
Have you ever seen the made for TV movie version of Lathe of Heaven that came on PBS back in the 80s? It's pretty good, especially considering what TV budgets were back then. Also, you should check out this video game called The Dream Machine. It's a point and click game for PC. All the characters and sets are made out of clay and cardboard and like cotton and stuff. It's pretty cool. I bought it on Steam about 5 or 6 years ago. It comes in chapters you could buy separately or you can buy the game as a whole. And the first chapter was available for free as a demo. I'd assume it's still available. The art style is really cool and it's got a trippy surreal story.
There have been 2 versions of film adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven...one in the late 70s early 80s is quite faithful to the book...another in the early 2000s which starred James Caan and Lisa Bonet (?)
The Cell definitely is in this category then, the protagonist is a psychiatrist that uses a machine to enter the dreams of her patients and deal with their subconscious. A serial killers gets in a coma while one of his victims is still alive and the FBI contacts the protagonist to enter the dreams of the serial killer and find clues regarding the location of the victim.
Great video. Curious: Have you seen the 80s film 'Dreamscape'? It definitely touches on the idea of using dreams in a therapeutic manner, specifically with a young boy who has nightmares about a snake man, although that's a subplot. Tarsem Singh's 'The Cell' seems almost like an extension of that very subplot, and Singh's visuals are just insane. It was his first full-length film. His second film, 'The Fall', is one of my all-time favorite fantasy films as well, though it has nothing to do with this concept.
Dreamscape started life as a movie adaptation of Zelazny's The Dream Master, the book that started all of this! He wrote the script, but it wasn't well liked so they brought in other writers and eventually the connection to The Dream Master was lost!
@@LiminalSpaces03 Oh wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, I can see how Zelazny's story might've been a bit to complex for 80s audiences, and just all-around difficult to film or fit into an approximately 2-hour time slot. That was, of course, many years before streaming networks existed, or the world wide web, for that matter. I think many of these old New Wave speculative fiction works would be great to adapt as a series or limited series on one of the streamers. So many good ones that are just ripe for adaptation, including this one. Incidentally, I love the way Zelazny describes the design of tech itself.
I don't have another book ATM, but I was reading some about Greek cults last night and I ran into the Athenian cult of Dionysos Limnaios, who is so named because in this regional variation he was supposed to have been born in the nearby marshes. The book includes a short quote about the 2nd day of their cult festival, with a fictional etymology for his name (the Greeks loved making up etymologies!): Phanodemus, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XI: ‘At the temple of Dionysus in Limnai the Athenians bring the new wine from the jars and mix it in honor of the god and then they drink it themselves. Because of this custom Dionysus is called Limnaios, because the wine was mixed with water and then for the first time drunk diluted.’ So in this case we have several different kinds of liminality blending together: the marshes between land and sea, and the ritualistic act of blending of water and wine, the altered state of consciousness reached through drinking of the wine, and the spiritual transformation attained through the cult rituals. Dionysian cults are typically centered around liberation and the pursuit of states of frenzy bordering on madness, which represent possession by Dionysos, ultimately all in the pursuit of spiritual purification. Like an ancient divine Ken Kesey. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to run into while thinking about your previous videos! These are so great, I need to dig into these books.
@@LiminalSpaces03 Thanks! And to be clear, several dieties have the epithet Limnaios, but Dionysus Limnaios was interesting because it included this extra etymology and ritual activity of mixing of wine and water. Also something that may just be a conincidence, I am not sure... the vessels for mixing wine and water are called kraters. But this is also the kind of vessel used for storing the ashes after cremation on a funeral pyre. Whether it is just a convenient shape, or if there is some symbolic connection between a wine mixing krater and an ash urn krater, I am unsure... but it does suggest the final liminality!
A couple of early books by Dean Koontz which might fit the trope: The first is A Darkness in My Soul. I have not read the second, but the title makes it a promising prospect. The title is, The Fall of the Dream Machine.
@liminalspaces03, In his early days as a writer, Koontz did more science fiction, and he was mixing some horror in with the sf. About the only book from those days I found disappointing was one called A Werewolf Among Us. I thought it came up short as both sf and horror.
What are dreams? Psychological processes of the "mind"? Material processes of the brain? Now there are, supposedly, people who can control their actions in a dream - "lucid dreamers". I am not certain if these people can control their dreams. It doesn't seem possible that people who can't control their own real life can, somehow, control who and what they dream about. Like flying or visiting different planets or chasing a bear instead of being chased by a bear. If there are people who can control what they dream about, would they be having dreams? I don't think so. I think their dream life would be just like their real life. Instead of their real life being mostly boring and "rational", and their dream life being "incoherent" emotions and settings; their dream life would be rational, like directing a movie. A movie with nothing original. The conceit of a dream master requires the unsaid knowledge that there is someone not only familiar about the "unconscious", but actually knows what it is. Makes the unconscious rational. In other words it takes the mystery out of consciousness. Now how would you do that? Consciousness is a vehicle for "reality", but it is not a complete vehicle: we don't know everything. We don't know if there are other planets with alien life, a spiritual realm with angels, demons and gods, what will be discovered or done tomorrow, and a host of other rational considerations. If we don't know everything, then what makes us sure that what we do know is "completely" safe? It seems to me that history teaches us that the "mark of civilization" is the neurotic belief that we know what its all about. Even our fantasies or sci-fi imaginings of our future never posit epistemological omniscience. It's always about some schmo going through some unexpected process he/she has to deal with. Deal with as best they can with imperfect knowledge. Beware anyone or thing that tells you they know what it's all about!
There's the truly dystopic This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. Not so much for therapy, but total societal control.
I loved the Lathe of Heaven, but I love all LeGuin so that's not surprising.
I was fondly remembering Maniac just this evening. I think I’ll enjoy your reading list.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may fall into this category. It has more to do with memory, but it takes place while he's sleeping, he can't undo it and it causes a cycle of emotional pain.
Good one!
Now that I've subscribed to your channel I'm gonna dig thru and see if you did a video on The Man Who Folded Himself, I read it like 40 years ago at the public library when I was 12, I don't remember who wrote it but it was the guy who created Land of the Lost, a great kid's TV show that "snuck in" a buncha great adult sci-fi concepts to little kids in the 70's.
That was written by David Gerrold of "Trouble with Tribbles" fame. I don't think that he created "Land of the Lost" but he was the story editor, and he wrote a lot of their episodes.
The author is David Gerrold. He has written a number of novels. His first fame was writing an episode of OST, The Trouble with Tribbles.
Interesting title! I'll check it out!
Lathe of Heaven seems to be Le Guin's closest approach to the world of PKD. An early novel by Dick which might be of interest is Eye in the Sky.
You are the second person to bring up "Eye in the Sky", I'm going to move it up my TBR list!
2nd Eye in the Sky, great read
Fascinating story subject and recommendations.
There was a surreal comedy show called "Dream Corp LLC" from 2016 that fits this genre exactly, and it's streaming on Hulu.
This sounds interesting! I'll check it out!
There's a chapter in the fourth Tournament of Psionic Murder novel where a psionic assassin places people into guided dreams where he tries to make them kill each other, while they think they're killing different people- it's just one chapter, not a whole novel about that but I guess it fits the trope. A really great series too
i actually am about to read lathe of heaven and this video drops 😻
i like the murakami strangeness of hardboiled wonderland. i kind of wish that he wrote more SF. his surreal idiosyncrasy is perfect for SF imho.
the shows "severance" and the abruptly cancelled "1899" come to mind.
I think he flirted with sci-fi a couple of times, but yes, I would've loved a couple more straight dci-fi from him!
I love Murakami, and HBWSTEOTW sits in my memory as one of his best, though it is many years since I read it. I suppose we all have our subjective sub-categories, but I always connected that book with Iain Banks’s Walking On Glass.
Lathe of Heaven is also a favourite.
Love what you are doing with this channel. I have always enjoyed the weird books which sit in these liminal spaces.
Thanks for watching! Just found out a new translation of HBWATEOTW has a new translation coming out in September of this year. I'll be announcing it on the channel update this week!
Not sure, but I think Paprika is based on a Japanese novel. Can't wait to see what new finds get added to this list; I hope, though, you spend more time on literature than film. I think it's awesome when a group comes together and joins in the labor (and it is a form of labor) of finding books and stories in this subgenre. And it's just fun. I never would have found (K)night of Delusions had it not been for this channel. Cheers.
Interesting, I wonder if the novel has been translated. I'm going to look into this!
Cool shirt!
"it is enough to have the strength and knowledge to raise our dream machines into the sky" :) I was reminded of Laibach's rendition of B Mashina. Also, in Planescape: Torment (the video game) I think there is a dream machine somewhere. The mere concept of a dream machine is evocative, I think.
Oh man, now I'm gonna have to bust out my Laibach records!
Falling water is worth a watch, dreamers cults around the dreaming, green sneakers. Only watched the first series. But they are charging for it now on prime. Maybe free in the states.
I'll check it out!
I'll add a recommend for: 🕯
Pan Sagittarius by Ian Wallace which is book 3 in a series, "croyd spacetime maneuvres"
might be more Mind Expanding than Bending, your millage may vary ;-)
If you get a chance please watch 'Legion'. There are mind-bending shows and then there's Legion. Another great trippy show is Doom Patrol. Love your channel, keep up the great work.
Loved the Doom Patrol comics as a teen, and I'm loving the show so far! I'm about halfway through season 2. I'll add Legion to the watch list!
@@LiminalSpaces03 Grant Morrison's run with 'Doom Patrol' is one of my favorites and it introduced me to writers like William S Burroughs and Jorge Luis Borges who were mind-bending in their own way. Great choice. I hope you like Legion.
I think your three points are perfect for the books you have on the table there and that those are exemplifications of the sub genre. I think it is important to keep that in mind as an anchor point when talking about other things like UBIK and Total Recall since they don’t exactly satisfy the three points but still have elements of them. Inception does satisfy these three points but instead of it being a direct therapy like the Dream Master, it uses the subconscious element to reveal a character’s weakness which eventually facilitates their healing.
Yeah, I think Inception deserves a place at the table. I'm going to chat about it in this weeks channel update.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch may qualify more so than Ubiq. Not exactly a dream machine but drug-induced virtual reality. I guess I wouldn’t be too concerned with keeping it super narrow about it. Manipulating the subconscious seems about right.
My favorite Dick novel thus far!
Id be surprised if Inception isnt mentioned...it was
Deathhunter by Ian Watson
Have you ever seen the made for TV movie version of Lathe of Heaven that came on PBS back in the 80s? It's pretty good, especially considering what TV budgets were back then. Also, you should check out this video game called The Dream Machine. It's a point and click game for PC. All the characters and sets are made out of clay and cardboard and like cotton and stuff. It's pretty cool. I bought it on Steam about 5 or 6 years ago. It comes in chapters you could buy separately or you can buy the game as a whole. And the first chapter was available for free as a demo. I'd assume it's still available. The art style is really cool and it's got a trippy surreal story.
There have been 2 versions of film adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven...one in the late 70s early 80s is quite faithful to the book...another in the early 2000s which starred James Caan and Lisa Bonet (?)
Jason is reviewing the PBS version this week! Look for his video Thursday!
@@LiminalSpaces03 Oh awesome!
@@keithparker1346 Never seen the 2000s version. Is it worth checking out?
The Cell definitely is in this category then, the protagonist is a psychiatrist that uses a machine to enter the dreams of her patients and deal with their subconscious. A serial killers gets in a coma while one of his victims is still alive and the FBI contacts the protagonist to enter the dreams of the serial killer and find clues regarding the location of the victim.
The Cell is on the list!
U should try Bioy Casares “Morel Invention”
You should watch Severance - totally within this realm of existential subconscious dichotomies 😉
I loved Severance!
Great video. Curious: Have you seen the 80s film 'Dreamscape'? It definitely touches on the idea of using dreams in a therapeutic manner, specifically with a young boy who has nightmares about a snake man, although that's a subplot. Tarsem Singh's 'The Cell' seems almost like an extension of that very subplot, and Singh's visuals are just insane. It was his first full-length film. His second film, 'The Fall', is one of my all-time favorite fantasy films as well, though it has nothing to do with this concept.
Dreamscape started life as a movie adaptation of Zelazny's The Dream Master, the book that started all of this! He wrote the script, but it wasn't well liked so they brought in other writers and eventually the connection to The Dream Master was lost!
@@LiminalSpaces03 Oh wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, I can see how Zelazny's story might've been a bit to complex for 80s audiences, and just all-around difficult to film or fit into an approximately 2-hour time slot. That was, of course, many years before streaming networks existed, or the world wide web, for that matter. I think many of these old New Wave speculative fiction works would be great to adapt as a series or limited series on one of the streamers. So many good ones that are just ripe for adaptation, including this one. Incidentally, I love the way Zelazny describes the design of tech itself.
I don't have another book ATM, but I was reading some about Greek cults last night and I ran into the Athenian cult of Dionysos Limnaios, who is so named because in this regional variation he was supposed to have been born in the nearby marshes. The book includes a short quote about the 2nd day of their cult festival, with a fictional etymology for his name (the Greeks loved making up etymologies!):
Phanodemus, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XI:
‘At the temple of Dionysus in Limnai the Athenians bring the new wine from the jars and mix it in honor of the god and then they drink it themselves. Because of this custom Dionysus is called Limnaios, because the wine was mixed with water and then for the first time drunk diluted.’
So in this case we have several different kinds of liminality blending together: the marshes between land and sea, and the ritualistic act of blending of water and wine, the altered state of consciousness reached through drinking of the wine, and the spiritual transformation attained through the cult rituals. Dionysian cults are typically centered around liberation and the pursuit of states of frenzy bordering on madness, which represent possession by Dionysos, ultimately all in the pursuit of spiritual purification. Like an ancient divine Ken Kesey.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to run into while thinking about your previous videos! These are so great, I need to dig into these books.
Incredible comment! This is so interesting!
@@LiminalSpaces03 Thanks! And to be clear, several dieties have the epithet Limnaios, but Dionysus Limnaios was interesting because it included this extra etymology and ritual activity of mixing of wine and water. Also something that may just be a conincidence, I am not sure... the vessels for mixing wine and water are called kraters. But this is also the kind of vessel used for storing the ashes after cremation on a funeral pyre. Whether it is just a convenient shape, or if there is some symbolic connection between a wine mixing krater and an ash urn krater, I am unsure... but it does suggest the final liminality!
The Thirteenth Floor.
A couple of early books by Dean Koontz which might fit the trope: The first is A Darkness in My Soul. I have not read the second, but the title makes it a promising prospect. The title is, The Fall of the Dream Machine.
Interesting! I wouldn't have thought of Koontz for this list!
@liminalspaces03, In his early days as a writer, Koontz did more science fiction, and he was mixing some horror in with the sf. About the only book from those days I found disappointing was one called A Werewolf Among Us. I thought it came up short as both sf and horror.
Great music, is it yours?
Yes and thank you!
What are dreams? Psychological processes of the "mind"? Material processes of the brain?
Now there are, supposedly, people who can control their actions in a dream - "lucid dreamers". I am not certain if these people can control their dreams. It doesn't seem possible that people who can't control their own real life can, somehow, control who and what they dream about. Like flying or visiting different planets or chasing a bear instead of being chased by a bear.
If there are people who can control what they dream about, would they be having dreams? I don't think so. I think their dream life would be just like their real life. Instead of their real life being mostly boring and "rational", and their dream life being "incoherent" emotions and settings; their dream life would be rational, like directing a movie. A movie with nothing original.
The conceit of a dream master requires the unsaid knowledge that there is someone not only familiar about the "unconscious", but actually knows what it is. Makes the unconscious rational. In other words it takes the mystery out of consciousness. Now how would you do that?
Consciousness is a vehicle for "reality", but it is not a complete vehicle: we don't know everything. We don't know if there are other planets with alien life, a spiritual realm with angels, demons and gods, what will be discovered or done tomorrow, and a host of other rational considerations.
If we don't know everything, then what makes us sure that what we do know is "completely" safe? It seems to me that history teaches us that the "mark of civilization" is the neurotic belief that we know what its all about.
Even our fantasies or sci-fi imaginings of our future never posit epistemological omniscience. It's always about some schmo going through some unexpected process he/she has to deal with. Deal with as best they can with imperfect knowledge.
Beware anyone or thing that tells you they know what it's all about!