Sometimes it seems the world just keeps pushing an idea at you. A similar theme keeps appearing in random places. Lately, for me, this has been the theme of dreaming, what happens when you dream, memories and reincarnation. As someone who has very vivid, long, dreams that are often quite disturbing, dreams have a fairly big effect on me. I keep coming across the theme that when you dream, you travel somewhere. Or this idea of reincarnation. And how memories play into all these things.

Three very random examples:

Insidious.
It was Halloween season and I recently got Netflix streaming at my house. Those two things mean I’ve been watching a lot of random, shitty movies. Don’t even get me started on The Shrine, a movie about a small town in the Polish countryside.

Anyways, I recently watched this movie, Insidious. Which, in my defense, did star Rose Bryn who’s totally a legit actress. In this thriller, a child goes into a coma because he’s traveled while dreaming and lost his way back. I won’t spoil the ending, but it was interesting to think about what does really happen when we dream? Where does our consciousness “go?”

Aleph.
I’m a big fan of author Paulo Coelho. If you haven’t read The Alchemist, you must. I recently read Coelho’s new book, Aleph, and the aleph is a place/space/moment where all things come together and are one. In the book, characters use the aleph to travel back to previous lives and address challenges that have affected them in subsequent lives.

So another story where people “travel” somewhere else almost in a dreamlike state.

Cloud Atlas.
I started seeing the commercials for this movie after seeing Insidious and reading Aleph. Although I’m not crazy about the Tom Hanks/Halle Berry pairing, the movie is  about reincarnation and souls traveling through different times.

So although I detest books with movie-version covers, I picked up the book at O’Hare featuring Hanks/Berry & co. on the cover. I’m almost finished with the book, and it’s interesting how the various story lines intersect and how the book is structured. I’m very curious to see how it all ends. And I’m not sure how successful the movie will be at showing all these connections – but the tagline for the movie is: Everything is Connected.

In conclusion, this post is a bit of a random rant, but these various books and movies, and more importantly, these recurring themes in my life, just made an impression on me. So I felt the need to write it all out. One last random coincidence. Part of the reason I did ultimately pick up Cloud Atlas was that the reviews about the book cited Haruki Murakami as being similar in style to this author’s writing. Pretty much if you mention Murakami, that’s a guarantee I’ll give a book a shot. So just days later, my co-worker lent me a book he highly recommended, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and lo & behold…it also cites Murakami right on the flap.