Near the end of Richard Linklater’s feature film Waking Life, one character relates a series of anecdotes about writer Philip K. Dick [PKD] and his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. As with most other speeches and exchanges in the film, that account denotes an appreciation for metaphysical mysteries and a fascination with the varying states of consciousness of the human mind, in connection with the potential attainment of a more genuine perception of reality, matters that were among PKD’s foremost concerns. It also alludes to the topic of empathy, which some consider to have been PKD’s ultimate interest. In fact, even if it didn’t make direct reference to the author, Linklater’s movie would still be evocative of his work, as many of the subjects it broaches, above and beyond the storyline’s explicit focus on lucid dreaming, are Dickian.

Waking Life, as a whole, conveys the seemingly limitless range of the diversity of the human being and of the elasticity of the human intellect. Its structure in short but meaningful encounters and conversations is devised to represent the dream state of the leading character, but resolves into an organic display of humans’ interest in ideas, of our willingness to explore abstract notions so as to better understand the universe, and of our ability to form interpersonal connections. The animation process used throughout, which looks casual in its imperfections in spite of its laborious and painstaking nature, produces a visual identity that adds to the general sensation the film affords, of watching something sparkling with life and movement — most often the movement of the mind associating impressions and concepts. At the same time, the belief that all the thoughts and ideas ever expressed in the world emanate from a single entity or consciousness is not only insinuated, it is directly addressed in some of the dialogues. In a graceful circular illustration of that hypothesis, Céline and Jesse, characters from Before Sunrise, a prior work of Linklater’s that would later become the first in a well-known series, appear in the protagonist’s dream and talk about a telepathic link everyone might be sharing, across space and time.

Many of the individuals the unnamed dreamer meets in the course of the narrative are strangers to him, which helps impart the sense of displacement and eeriness that does come sometimes with dreams; a sense pervaded, however, by a kind of freedom that may indicate a real belonging. Such contradiction can feel insurmountable, while the prospect of solving it can be alluring, and the film communicates the dreamer’s hesitancy in deciding whether he wants to leave or to remain in the different environments he traverses. At one point, he is asked how he feels about his ongoing dream, and he answers: “sometimes I feel kind of isolated, but most of the time I feel really connected” and considers that it is strange that he feels so engaged when he has been mostly “passive, not really responding”. But he then adds a remarkable note concerning his interlocutors: “most of the things that I would want to say, it’s like they kind of say it for me, and almost at my cue. It’s, like, complete unto itself.” His bewilderment, along with repeated allusions in the film to a desired unreachable absolute of “connection”, echoes PKD’s own description of Flow My Tears in a letter to his editor: “It deals with a variety of forms of love, about ten kinds in all, ending with a form of love which I can't explain but which has to do with strangers.”

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When Laurie Anderson says, in her film Heart of a Dog, that she finally realized that “the purpose of death is the release of love”, how should that be interpreted? As meaning that someone’s love for another is restored, or purified, or fully acknowledged at last, after the loved one is gone? In the scenes before that pronouncement is heard in the film, Anderson talks about the final days of her dog Lolabelle and says that she had learned to love Lolabelle “as she had loved us, with a tenderness we didn’t know we had”, implying that some new dimension to her love for Lolabelle had been made manifest by the dog’s impending death and ultimate passing.

But could “the release of love” the artist speaks of also be pointing to the love from those who have departed, perceived only thereafter by the surviving loved ones? Heart of a Dog addresses the death of Anderson’s mother as well, and while Anderson states that, at the time it occurred, she didn’t feel that she loved her mother, she shifts towards the question of whether her mother loved her. Attempting a Buddhist exercise of recalling one moment when her mother “truly loved” her “without a single reservation”, she isn’t able to find such an occasion; in the film’s voice-over, she expresses perplexity and agitation when she formulates the question “did you ever really love me?”. But eventually a new grasp on an old childhood memory, of one time her mother praised her when young Laurie was expecting a rebuke, leads Anderson to declare: “when I think of her now, I realize that was the moment I had been trying to remember.”

Those two experiences — feeling love for someone, and feeling loved by someone — are not the same. Or is that a difference that makes no difference?

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Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, first published in 1974, is a thriller, a science-fiction tale taking place in a weird, alternate future, propelled for the most part by the main character Jason Taverner’s quest to understand what is going on, and composed of a stream of action scenes and anxiety-ridden episodes. At the midpoint, Ruth Rae, a woman who plays a mere secondary role in the grand-scheme of the narrative, and who actually won’t be reappearing later on, voices an arresting personal reflection about the nature of love and the meaning of grief.

In the thick of a stressful sequence of events, Ruth and Jason have what is, at first, a disorganized and fractured conversation, but becomes a more focused dialogue when Ruth tries to define real love. Initially, she fumbles with an example of a father dying while saving his children from a burning house, to illustrate that “when you love you cease to live for yourself”; this sounds plain, but it prompts the insightful association that love, in that respect, “overcomes instinct.” When Jason questions why it should be good to go against the instinct for self-survival, Ruth seems to acquire a calm authority and says: “Because the instinct for survival loses in the end.” Whoever you are, whatever your situation, you can never truly “accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do”. Ultimately, you will perish. In a sense, to experience love, one must come to terms utterly with one’s mortality, or, framed the other way around, the experience of love can release a person from the fear of dying. Maybe it dispels some illusion that is at the root of that fear.

Because Jason notes that those whom one loves die too, and states “it’s better not to love so that never happens to you”, Ruth goes into a consideration of  “grief”, which she believes is the most powerful emotion anyone can feel, and is a “good” feeling because “it causes you to leave yourself”. She declares that “you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it” and then expounds on how grief may sometimes be too much of a strain on the physical body: unlike real death, which she sees as a pure void without even the consciousness of nothingness, to grieve is to “die and to be alive at the same time”, which is unbearable. It reunites a person with what they lost, but that also entails the loss of a little bit of themselves, because “you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it” and “you don’t ever completely come back from where you went”. As a result, when that process happens many times over, “too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can’t feel grief anymore. And then you yourself are ready to die.”  

At the close of that late scene in Waking Life in which Philip K. Dick is mentioned, the man speaking with the protagonist goes on to reveal a streamlined metaphysical vision that he claims was given to him in a dream: that everyone’s life-story can be regarded as a series of “no, thank you”, a continuously repeated negative answer to an invitation proffered by God; and death, a final “yes”.

Throughout the second half of the film, a relation between the dreaming state and an imaginable realm of the dead is adumbrated, with the dreamer being given more and more reasons, such as his inability to wake up, to wonder if he may in fact be dead instead of dreaming. The dumbfoundness and general feeling of ambivalence he exhibits bring to mind Ruth Rae’s view of grief in Flow My Tears, with its image of a person split between two worlds; for Waking Life’s dreamer, lucid dreaming — not necessarily the deliberately manipulated adventure as suggested by one character in the film, but solely the occurrence of being aware that one is dreaming — may be, just like grief to Ruth Rae, almost too intense to be endured at length.

In Linklater’s exploration of the oneiric world, there is an underlying inquiry into the meaning of death, with a proposition that dreaming involves or enables the establishment of a connection with the level of existence to which beings conceivably progress when they die. Such a connection would imply that dreams provide clues into what God, to use the imagery heard in the film, is offering; and that dreams hold confirmation of the possibility intuited by Laurie Anderson, of a greater dimension of love. In which case the dreamworld would be a purer reality than the waking state, the latter amounting to an artificial limitation imposed upon the vastness of the former. In other words, if death turns out to be the end of an experience that is illusory and fleeting, and if such an end will permit a new or renewed awareness of something true and permanent; and if the state of (un)consciousness akin to death that is sustained in sleep can constitute a temporary journey into that realm; then dreams are not less real than the “waking life”, but more so.

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