What Dreams May Come – (1998) Things are not what they seem in death. Twinned souls, Dr Christopher Nielsen (Robin Williams) and his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra), an artist, lose their two children in an automobile accident. Four years later Chris dies in a car crash as well. In the company of his medical mentor Albert (Cuba Gooding, Jr), who tells Chris, “You didn’t disappear; you only died,” Chris witnesses his funeral and watches his grieving wife write in her diary. Annie blames herself for everyone’s death. Eventually Chris leaves the temporal world for the place where we all eventually go, finding himself inside what at first seems like one of Annie’s painting. (The picture received an Academy Award for visual effects of fantastic scenery.)

“It’s your world,” Albert explains. “You’re in your house; it’s not like you are your house.” Awareness is existence, not your body or your brain, which are meat that rots away. “Thought is real; physical is the illusion.” Chris asks, “Where’s God?” Albert replies, “He’s up there.” Souls can take forms other than those of their earthly existence; they can if they so choose return to mortality through reincarnation. “Hell is for those who don’t know they’re dead,” Albert says. “The real hell is your life gone wrong” and losing one’s mind.

Marie, Chris’s daughter, finds him and introduces him to the city; souls here have work to perform. Albert returns from a mission to inform Chris that Annie has committed suicide. But suicides go somewhere else for having violated their natural journey through life. Undaunted Chris determines to find her and recover her, arguing with Albert’s caution that no one has ever seen a suicide brought back: You said there are no rules; I’m not giving up. They go to a tracker (Max von Sydow) who helps guide Chris to Annie but warns him of her complete denial, “Nothing will make her recognize you,” and of spending more than a few minutes with her because “Once her reality becomes yours” his mind will be lost forever like hers.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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