Today I had eight hours of sleep. That’s an hour more than what the doctors recommend for someone my age, which means that I shouldn’t have felt tired. But, I did. My entire day was ruined. I was sluggish, unmotivated, and unprepared to deal with every problem that came my way. I had fallen victim to waking up on the “Wrong Side of the Bed”, which actually presented me with an interesting question. Why do we feel tired sometimes even when we’ve got a full night’s rest? And for that matter, why do we even sleep at all?
I’ve read a lot about the human mind and although I can’t even begin to call myself a professional, I can tell you that other professionals have reached some wild but reasonable answers to the seemingly frivolous activity. And, what’s really cool is that in their pursuit towards understanding why we sleep, it’s given us a better understanding of art, why we create it, and why we need it almost as much as we need sleep.
Experts used to think that our yearning for sleep was an adaptive trait designed to push us to seek shelter from danger. But as we refined our understanding, this popular thought was eventually replaced by the idea that sleep is our way of conserving energy throughout the day. Indeed, sleep does help us conserve energy. But it also does far more than just that. Recent physiological evidence suggests that it’s also a rejuvenating process for the mind and body as scientists have found that many of our restorative functions from muscle rejuvenation to the release of growth hormones take place more effectively or even exclusively when we’re sleeping.
But, it gets even crazier when you get into Brain Plasticity Theory because not only does our body rejuvenate when we sleep, but we also produce stronger and more efficient neural connections. Our neurons are literally in constant motion, processing our day-to-day experiences, which may be directly linked to our dreams and why we have them.
Think about the last dream you had. Hell, think about every dream you’ve ever had, from funny and goofy to tragic and sad. Every single dream, minus a few outliers, has been conflict-driven. You’ve always been chased by something, gone through an embarrassing situation, lost a loved one, or went through something, which required you to respond to a pressing matter. So, why is this?
Are we producing stories and instances in our dreams because we’re re-arranging our neural pathways? Is this our way of processing the emotional responses to everyday experiences so that we’re better prepared for the next day? Perhaps the phenomenon of dreaming is nothing more than our way of simulating experiences as they did on, “The Matrix”.
Obviously, we’re never going to forget to put our pants on when we go to work and it’s likely that we’re never going to get chased by a mountain lion. But, we may find ourselves in an equally embarrassing or threatening situation that requires us to respond appropriately so that we can come out on top.
Perhaps that’s the reason why our dreams are so conflict-ridden. Maybe, we dream because it's nature’s way of perfecting itself; like we’re nothing more than iPhones plugged into an outlet only, instead of simply charging we’re also making software updates.
Now here’s where things get a little weird and this is something that a lot of scientists and filmmakers never really think about. If you were to pick up any screenwriting book they would teach you about the simple but eloquent Three-Act Structure. That’s single-handedly the most common way to structure a story and what’s interesting is that it’s rife with conflict or what writers call plot points, which drives the story to some sort of conclusion.
This is essentially the structure of almost every movie you’ve ever watched and it’s always driven by conflict. That’s strange, isn’t it: That conflict seems to be universally characteristic in media and art. It’s very telling of what films mean to us.
If our neurons are strengthening connections while we’re engaged in conflict-ridden dreams and, if the standard for film is all about driving conflict to tell the story…Well then, maybe we create movies to better process and understand the problems we face, just as we do when we dream.
We always see film and art as this intangible abstraction that has little meaning or real value. But maybe its value lies in helping us see reality more clearly. If that is the case, then we can surmise that film is nothing more than a consequence of our struggle to better know ourselves and the World around us just as our dreams may be a consequence of our brain trying to better understand the world by rearranging neurons while we sleep.
This might also explain why we always have sex, drugs, and violence in media. Maybe, it’s not because we idolize vice, but rather, because we’re afraid of vice and the consequences that erupt after committing such acts. So we may be recreating them as a way to observe, understand, and better prepare ourselves for when we must face such things. But because our lives are so cushioned compared to our ancestors, the conflicts we portray in a lot of our content, today, seem dull and almost meaningless compared to how stories used to be written.
Granted, we have far more stories than ever before so there are many exceptions to this observation, but when it comes to the most popular tentpole summer blockbuster movies? It certainly appears to be this way.
And what’s funny is that most people see senseless violence and other vices as proof that society is going down the drain. Many are saying that we don’t have moral values or a sense of right and wrong and that all the extreme violence in films is evidence of this.
But maybe it’s just extreme and frequent because the need to process something like violence is less important than it was before, so it almost naturally gravitates to something arbitrary for the simple shock value, instead of a means to intimately connect the viewer to the realities of such violent acts that are as foreign to them as the surface of Jupiter. Obviously, we still see a meditation on realistic acts of violence in many films, but in a lot of ways, we’re seeing less of that in popular movies.
I guess in a real way, this senseless portrayal of violence seems to show progress, since if it were otherwise, the violence might be more realistic and less massive in scale like you see in all the blockbuster summer hits. Maybe if we were doing worse then, at least our popular stories might be better.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m an avid movie-watcher and see tons of great stuff and even if the movie isn’t that appealing to me, I can at least recognize their appeal and respect the amazing work that’s gone into them. But, perhaps all movies across the board could be better and we simply fail to realize how they can be better because most of our lives are too comfortable.
The kinds of conflicts most of us face in society, today, aren’t nearly as visceral and life-threatening as they were before. There isn’t some overarching goal or a high-stakes game we’re trying to achieve. There’s less working towards things and more working to get things and simply live. And all of that? Well. Maybe it muted our sense of creativity because there’s just less of a need for it.
Things are getting more intense, these days, though and I think it will get worse as we’re all sort of wading in this massive existential crisis. Maybe things will stabilize but, who knows? And if everything goes down the tube, then film and other mediums of art will have a deeper level of importance for society because it may be the last place where genuine conversations about our problems can occur and that can ultimately help us process these issues, which can help us synthesize real solutions.
Art exists for a reason. It may be fluid and arbitrary but that doesn’t mean it has no reason for existing. It exists because we want to perfect ourselves. We’re hard-wired to do so. Sure, not everyone wants to pick up a laptop and type up a 120-page screenplay but, we all dream.
And if we always dreamt of a stranger in an unfamiliar place, experiencing non-conflicts that have no relevance to our lives then, we wouldn’t feel connected to the dream and therefore, we wouldn’t be able to make the right neural connections to maximize our response to situations that happen in our everyday lives.
And that’s why we need to be more responsible with our films because our films do what our dreams do; they help us understand our problems and aid us in better handling them. We can’t just produce mindless indulgence filled with conflicts devoid of meaning. The formula that big studios use is effective in making profits, but it’s dulling the stories we need in order to make better sense of everything.
Stories may just seem like entertainment, but they’re paramount to our survival and a way for us to progress internally so that we can progress externally. If we blindly make films, believing that it’s only entertainment then, we blindly misinterpret our own struggles. So, we stagnate.
One day if we ever reach perfection then art will no longer exist as something important and therefore, it’ll be created just to stave off boredom. Thankfully, perfection will never exist because if it did, then we’d have nothing more to work towards. There would be nothing left to do. And more startling, it would cheapen art to the extent that we would no longer connect to it.
We’re gonna go through our crisis and reach closer to perfection but eventually one day, we’ll find something else to improve upon and the cycle will continue. We can conquer the Universe and then-some but, we’ll never be perfect and our endeavors will continue. That’s why we’ll always need art and, as long as we can better understand the reason for the phenomenon and remind ourselves of that reason, then we’ll always be able to move forward.
Story Prism, LLC
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