The Night­mare

Is there any more obvi­ous sign­post of the fact that mind-oblit­er­at­ing bore­dom is in the off­ing than when some­one strikes up a con­ver­sa­tion with the feed line, ​“Y’know, I had the strangest dream last night…” Yes, go on, tell me aaaaaall about it. I’m just dying to hear [blud­geons self with Biro]. It’s some­thing of a minor coup, then, that direc­tor Rod­ney Asch­er has, with sur­gi­cal pre­ci­sion, removed the cloy­ing stig­ma from this dras­tic social faux pas and built an entire movie inspired by the process.

For­mal­ly, this is much the same as his pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Room 237, in which var­i­ous loon­bags offered up their crack­pot the­o­ries about how The Shin­ing was, say, Kubrick’s apolo­gia for fak­ing the moon land­ings. In The Night­mare, Asch­er exam­ines the afflic­tion of sleep paral­y­sis, where suf­fer­ers expe­ri­ence strange­ly lucid night ter­rors from which they seem phys­i­cal­ly unable to wake/​escape.

The film is struc­tured around a series of inter­views, and Asch­er is clear­ly search­ing for com­mon threads with­in the vivid tes­ti­monies he receives. As a way to visu­alise these out­pour­ings, we’re then treat­ed to effects-dri­ven mon­tages intend­ed to rep­re­sent the macabre scenes occur­ring inside the test sub­jects’ volatile minds. A demon cat prowls in and suf­fo­cates one dream­er when it holes up on her chest. Then we have the lop­ing shad­ow man with red laser eyes who slumps slow­ly into the bed­room at night. Some­times things can get grue­some­ly nasty, as stab­bing mech­a­nised blades slice up the low­er tor­so. But like Fred­dy Krueger, they’re not real­ly real.

What ini­tial­ly comes across as a hokey attempt to just show people’s night­mares – and thus con­nect a hack­neyed daisy-chain between movies and spooky inte­ri­or pro­jec­tions – is revealed as a sin­cere attempt to actu­al­ly artic­u­late the sub­tle pat­terns that crop up in the minds of suf­fer­ers across the globe. Very lit­tle of sub­stance is known about the con­di­tion, and many who do put up with it are left with the daffy ram­blings thrown up by search engine bur­row­ing or, worse, vlogging.

Even though the task is akin to herd­ing cats, Asch­er does at least attempt to come away with a few basic con­jec­tures, the main one being a link back to for­ma­tive mem­o­ries and, specif­i­cal­ly, the ear­ly con­sump­tion of hor­ror movies. One man even admits that the recur­ring dream he had of a black sil­hou­et­ted man look­ing towards the mouth of a red tun­nel one day revealed itself as a detail from the open­ing cred­its of Oliv­er Stone’s Nat­ur­al Born Killers. Though in the end, you do come away with more sense of the abject hor­ror caused by this con­di­tion than robust insight into its caus­es and effects.