OUR TOP 10 LISTS

INCEPTION, Christopher Nolan's dream-invasion thriller, takes place largely inside the unconscious mind of a sleeping man, but some would argue that all movies are, to some extent, an expression of our collective unconscious. Hollywood is, as the cliche goes, a dream factory, and Freudian analysts and film theorists alike have longer compared movie-watching to dreaming.

The list of memorable dream movies could go on practically ad infinitum, but here is an eclectic (and necessarily incomplete) list of 10 of the greatest, ranging from films with classic dream sequences to those that come seductively or unnervingly close to capturing the mood and logic of our dreams and nightmares.

Author: Dennis Lim

10. THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (2006)

The overstimulated hero (Gael Garcia Bernal) of Michel Gondry's mournful ode to childhood regression has a hard time distinguishing his dreams from his waking life. Gondry has said that the dreams in the movie, romper-room fantasies filled with elaborate cardboard and papier-mache props, are based on his own.

9. LIVING IN OBLIVION (1995)

Tom DiCillo's comic meta movie, about the perils of low-budget indie filmmaking, consists largely of dream sequences and culminates in the ultimate meta-dream sequence, complete with smoke machines and an irate dwarf. Steve Buscemi plays the beleaugered filmmaker hero, whose last name, Reve, means "dream" in French.

8. AUDITION (1999)

The film that brought Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike to international attention begins as a low-key romance between a widower and an apparently demure young woman then shifts into the most horrifying of avenging-angel scenarios. As the violence mounts, the line between reality and fantasy vanishes, and the effect is of a seamless nightmare from which there is no escape.

7. WAKING LIFE (2001)

Richard Linklater, American cinema's master of free-associative dialogue, explores the shadowy edges of consciousness in this existential sleepwalk about the adventures of a lucid dreamer. The innovative rotoscope technique converts live action to animation, turning reality into something as fluid and slippery as a dream.

6. PAPRIKA (2006)

In the near-future Japan of Satoshi Kon's delirious anime, a psychiatric institute has developed dream machines that allow researchers to plug into the restless minds of sleeping patients. When the devices go missing, all hell breaks loose, leading the movie and its characters into the deepest recesses of the unconscious: a sinister and chaotic world rendered with vivid, eye-popping invention.

5. VIDEODROME (1983)

David Cronenberg's best films are mind-expanding head trips, none more so than this seminal cross between techno paranoia and body horror. As James Woods's sleazy cable-TV entrepreneur stumbles through an Escher maze of altered states, the film becomes a disturbing meditation on the power of images to affect us in ways we don't immediately understand, on the relationship between what we watch and who we are.

4. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)

A nameless man tries to convince a nameless woman that they had met before but is he unearthing a repressed memory or implanting a false one? A film in which nothing is what it seems and everything seems to happen at once, Alain Resnais's ultra-chic head-scratcher (costumes by Coco Chanel) is an unsolvable puzzle movie that mimics the associative logic of the unconscious.

3. VERTIGO (1958)

Dreams are all-important in Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film, a perverse portrait of romantic pathology in which James Stewart's acrophobic detective becomes obsessed with an enigmatic woman (or, more to the point, haunted by her image). The film has the feel of a sustained hallucination, and mid-movie, the hero's irrational passion spills over into a partly animated, semi-psychedelic nightmare that ends with him plunging from a tower in a vertiginous freefall.

2. UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929)

With the help of his friend Salvador Dalí, Luis BuÒuel began his movie career with one of the most shocking openings in film history: a close-up of a razor slicing into a woman's eyeball. The rest of this 16-minute short is nearly as outrageous and every bit as visceral, a surrealist's handbook and a wellspring of dream imagery for years to come.

1. MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

Any number of David Lynch films, from his surrealist debut ERASERHEAD to his latest, the three-hour waking nightmare INLAND EMPIRE could have made it onto this list. But this poisoned valentine to the dream factory is the ultimate expression of Lynch's deep love-hate relationship with Hollywood. Split into mirror-image halves and filled with doppelganger alter-egos, the movie could be a death-bed dream and/or a wish-fulfilling fantasy on the part of its struggling-actress heroine (Naomi Watts). Either way, it does what Lynch has said is true of the very best movies: It leaves room to dream.