SEEABLE RELATIONSHIP. SAYABLE CONNECTION #04: In Search of Lost Time

This post is not an organised writing or essay, but a fragmented thought.

In the Dream and In-between

Once, dreams were understood as glimpses of the future. They were believed to carry messages from ancestors, warning of dangers or fortunes. Alternatively, they were seen as suppressed desires—long-held yet unfulfilled affections. Now, it has become common knowledge that dreams are merely fragmented memories, assembled by the brain in a seemingly arbitrary manner. And yet, we still do not know why we sleep or why we dream. Its function remains one of the greatest mysteries of human existence.

Deleuze, referencing Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, analyses it as an assemblage—one that is encyclopaedic, non-hierarchical, and self-reflexive, indicating a systematic heterogeneity. If his book is an assemblage of these three qualities, then it is not unreasonable to consider it a ‘dream.’ It is a diagrammatised dream. It is no surprise that his book begins in the liminal space between dream and reality. His monologue exists in both dimensions.

Upon waking and checking the time, he soon finds himself speaking within a dream, where the boundary between reality and dream is unclear. Each dimension operates within its own system, as Deleuze suggests. In dreams, there is randomness—randomness from the perspective of the ‘real’ dimension. Figures and relationships appear and disappear. A stranger may become a dearest and most passionate lover, while a ‘real’ sweetheart may transform into the purest sadness. One certainty remains: dreams are self-reflective. The two dimensions are not connected by fractured memories alone; rather, the human body serves as the mediator of emotions and experiences in the dream. It is the only link that allows what is experienced to be represented. The self-reflective dream constructs each representation according to its own system, and that representation is shaped by conscious experience.

From the viewer’s perspective, film elicits affect by presenting moving images through constrained vision, unlike novels or illustrations. It does not grant the viewer the freedom to forge connections or restructure the imagery into a personal narrative. It does not provide the space to move one’s body. Film is not self-reflective but outwardly reflective. Its strong authorship—whether that of the director or of the systemic imagery itself—confines the viewer within its dream, or rather, its diagrammatised dream. The heterogeneous image structure paralyses the viewer, compelling them to relinquish their body and instead exist through the screen. A multitude of freed souls wander across the cinematic space. Do they know where they are? Do they know where they are heading?

Just as the purpose of dreams is not to create a coherent story or structured narrative, the primary function of film, I believe, is to spill out fragmented memories, experiences, emotions—sadness, happiness, and whatever else human beings produce in response to the world and others. Many filmmakers feared that the remote control would usurp their authority, distributing control to the audience. Has this truly happened? Or have we been analysing it from the wrong perspective? Perhaps the author was never truly the king, nor the source of aesthetic control. Since modernism, authorship has become an archaic and forgotten term.

But it is as if we have killed a man who never existed.

I will analyse this further in the next post.

New Questions

• What is the phenomenology of the dream and imagery?
• How is the condition of the diagram?
• Is the diagram both a figure and a background? Content and form?