Waking Life - Delpy and Hawke share the ITLADian perspective?!?!?

Waking life is one of my favourite movies of all time and I found myself watching it again last night. During one scene/dream between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, i was amazed to realise that during their conversation, the couple are subscribing to Tony's theory about time being subjective, about how the final few minutes of brain activity could arguably be your whole life. They also discuss the time distortion of dreams aswell as several other topics relevant to such discussions. The two of them were of course happily paired together after making the two previous romances "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset." These films are incredibly dialogue fuelled, and both masterpieces and i would recommend anyone who hasn't seen them to check them out. (particularly Karl being the little romantic that you are!) So anyway, back to Waking Life. Waking life is a film length look at dreams within dreams. A boy (we presume) keeps having false awakenings and bounces about from one interesting discussion to the next. It's incredibley clever and achieves it's goal of explaining the unexplainable. Here is the extract in question in which Delpy and Hawke's characters discuss a rather ITLADian perspective:



I keep thinking about something you said.
- Something I said? - Yeah.
About how you often feel like you're observing your life...
from the perspective of an old woman about to die.
- You remember that? - Yeah. I still feel that way sometimes.
Like I'm looking back on my life.
Like my waking life is her memories.
Exactly.
I heard that Tim Leary said as he was dying...
that he was looking forward to the moment...
when his body was dead, but his brain was still alive.
They say that there's still 6 to 12 minutes of brain activity after everything is shut down.
And a second of dream consciousness, right,
well, that's infinitely longer than a waking second.
- You know what I'm saying? - Oh, yeah, definitely.
For example, I wake up and it's 10:12
and then I go back to sleep and I have those long, intricate,
beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours,
and then I wake up and it's... 10:13 .
Exactly. So then 6 to 12 minutes of brain activity,
I mean, that could be your whole life.
I mean, you are that woman looking back over everything.
Okay, so what if I am? Then what would you be in all that?
Whatever I am right now.
I mean, yeah, maybe I only exist in your mind.
I'm still just as real as anything else.
Yeah.
- I've been thinking also about something you said. - What's that?
Just about reincarnation and where all the new souls come from over time.
Everybody always say that they've been the reincarnation...
of Cleopatra or Alexander the Great.
I always want to tell them they were probably some dumb fuck like everybody else.
I mean, it's impossible. Think about it.
The world population has doubled in the past 40years, right?
- So if you really believe in that ego thing of one eternal soul, - Mm-hmm.
then you only have a 50% chance of your soul being over 40.
And for it to be over 150 years old, then it's only one out of six.
So what are you saying then? Reincarnation doesn't exist...
or that we're all young souls like where half of us are first-round humans?
No, no. What I'm trying to say is that somehow I believe...
reincarnation is just a--
a poetic expression of what collective memory really is.
There was this article by this biochemist that I read not long ago,
and he was talking about how when a member of a species is born,
it has a billion years of memory to draw on.
And this is where we inherit our instincts.
I like that. It's like there's, um,
this whole telepathic thing going on that we’re all a part of,
whether we’re conscious of it or not.
That would explain why there's all these, you know,
seemingly spontaneous, worldwide, innovative leaps in science, in the arts.
You know, like the same results poppin' up everywhere independent of each other.
Some guy on a computer, he figures something out,
and then almost simultaneously, a bunch of other people all over the world...
- figure out the same thing. - Mm-hmm.
They did this study. They isolated a group of people over time,
and they monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles...
in relation to the general population.
And then they secretly gave them a day-old crossword,
one that had already been answered by thousands of other people.
Their scores went up dramatically, like percent.
So it's like once the answers are out there,
you know, people can pick up on 'em.
It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

Yet another one for your ever growing list Anthony! This is just one out of about 15 scenes/dreams like this in the film. Go watch it now!

Martin