From Robert Downey Jr.’s Tesla-coil skyscrapers to Kate Winslet’s baby-eating hamsters, Empire reveals what really boils in those creative subconsciouses, while dream expert Kelly Bulkeley PhD provides analysis — without us telling him who’s enjoying the in-sleep entertainment...
This article was first published in issue 250 of Empire magazine. __Subscribe today{
“I’m coming into a modern city and the buildings are charging each other with electricity, like big Tesla coils. Then I go on a date with two twins and they kill me at the end. Analyse that.”
*“One night, years ago, I dreamt an entire storyline for a sequel to Meet The Feebles. It was based on the idea that in New Zealand there’s no law saying you have to be human to stand for parliament. So someone comes up with the idea of the Feebles running in the election. Heidi the hippo becomes Prime Minister and they all become the government of New Zealand. Then the dream continued with everyone realising that the puppets haven’t actually been voted in — what’s been voted in are the puppeteers, these terribly difficult prima donnas who now have control over the country. I woke up thinking, ‘Wow, that would be a really cool movie!’ Ever since I’ve wished I’d dream another movie plot.” *
“I remember when we were shooting Kafka I had a dream in which I’d cast Paul Hogan as Kafka. This was back during the whole Crocodile Dundee thing, when he was a huge star. I was standing there looking at him going, ‘He’s blond, he’s tanned... how am I going to convince people that this is a viable creative decision on my part?’ As it turned out, commercially it probably would have been a better idea to have put Hogan in it.”
“When I was nine years old, I dreamt I was a hippo in a ballerina skirt, like the one in Fantasia. It got worse, because I had to pee in my dream and when I woke up, I’d wet my bed. That’s pretty embarrassing, right?”
“I dreamt that I was a homeless person on a bridge, wearing very tattered layers of clothing and the world was cast in this sepia tone. I was fishing for worms on the Thames with a long piece of string. Then I would pull the worms out and put them in my mouth.”
“I have this dream about falling. People say that if you ever hit the ground you’ll have a heart attack and die. So I try to stay with the dream and see what happens. I’ve actually hit the ground, gone through and ended up in water. Then I start flying. It’s a very cool dream. I look forward to it now.”
“I’ve had a lot of incredibly vivid aircraft-about-to-crash dreams. You know, when you wake up and it feels like it happened — a lot of airplanes narrowly avoiding things, coming down fast. I’m never flying the plane. I’m always freaking out in the back.”
“Everything’s white and blurry, with a shrill, high-pitched noise. Then slowly things come into focus and I see there’s a wee ballet dancer standing there. The noise gets louder, the whiteness gets more intense, and the ballet dancer keeps getting bigger and bigger. Then she goes, ‘POP!’ and becomes a pair of shoes!”
“When I was a kid, one of our hamsters suddenly gave birth; we didn’t even know she was pregnant. We phoned the pet shop and they said, ‘Take the babies away — hamsters get very frightened after they’ve given birth and you don’t want her to eat the babies.’ We didn’t listen and that’s exactly what happened. This obviously affected me badly as I had a recurring dream about hamsters gobbling up [their] babies until I was about 15.”
“I had a really cool dream that I was doing a scene with the young Jack Nicholson. We were in the desert with this really rad-looking ’70s car, and I was really killing this scene, being super-great in it. And then the wardrobe people came over and said, ‘He’s wearing the wrong colour shirt,’ and I was really upset — all this good work I’d done was ruined because Jack’s shirt wasn’t the right colour.”
“I was standing under a huge tree — it must have been on the Serengeti, somewhere in Africa — and I was watching my family getting eaten by lions. I had that dream over and over again when I was a kid... Even now I’m shit-scared of lions, and when I go to the zoo I get the feeling that they’re plotting to get me.”
“I’m in a hotel room with a very close girlfriend of mine, except now she’s a famous actress and has all these people around her. We’re arguing about things, how close we used to be, then she starts crying and I take her in my arms. I say, ‘Don’t be sad — we had an amazing time.’ Then, suddenly, we’re in bed together, but we’ve turned into men. I’m Thomas Magnum and she’s Mike Hammer, but we’re really fat and hairy and have moustaches. Then we run through a jungle, jump off a cliff and get freeze-framed in the air, as a title card in big red letters flashes up. I woke up and couldn’t stop laughing.”
“I once had a dream that happened quite a few times, where my dog fell apart like a hot dog and I had to put him back together with toothpicks. I don’t know what it means.”
“The recurring dream from my childhood was the Wicked Witch Of The West walking up my road, bending each lamp post over and blowing out each lamp one by one as she got closer and closer, and when she blew out the last lamp I woke up... like, wailing.”
Kelly Bulkeley PhD is author of Dreaming In The World’s Religions: A Comparative History and An Introduction To The Psychology Of Dreaming. [www kellybulkeley.com](http://www kellybulkeley.com)