The Dream Life | The Nation   The Dream Life    • Share   •
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Gilberto Perez Gilberto Perez, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence
College, is the author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their
Medium (...   Some may argue that, unlike dreams, films seem
real, to which McGinn has a clever reply: Dreams seem real too,
while we are dreaming them, even if not when we recollect them
afterward. But surely neither dreams nor films affect us in
exactly the same way as reality. Saying that they both seem
"real" to us just means that in both cases we're caught up in
illusion, and there are different degrees and different kinds of
illusion, which must be sorted out in order to understand more
accurately the points of similarity between films and dreams--
and also the points of divergence. McGinn dismisses Surrealism
as too unreal in its representation of dreams, but the phony
dream scenes designed by Dalí for Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945)
are the sole example he gives. He d