Lucid Dream: It's All in Your Head

How much you like or loathe a scifi movie can be dependent on its central premise. You can live without good acting, good directing, and good dialogue, and not mind some sub-par special effects if the flick has got a really cool concept in play. The idea doesn't have to be completely sound but it does need to be interesting. In Kim Joon-Sung's Lucid Dream, the radical notion is that, through induced dreaming, you can step into your memories and look around and gather details you've previously overlooked. You have the option of walking around too but once you start to change location, you also impact the integrity of the memory. It's like we all have photographic memory and if we could just study said photos, we'd be able to parse every detail. That's probably not quite enough for a scifi movie. Well, Lucid Dream does indeed go further.

You can also enter other people's dreams, once you've identified the dreamer's frequency on your fancy computer. Once inside someone's head, you can ask questions that maybe you can't in real life because they're in a coma or something like that. But if the person in the coma dies then you'll be trapped in that dream forever. (Not sure why you don't just die or end up in a coma with no dream afterwards but I have to trust the experts in the movie here.)

And so, we have a reporter (Go Soo) who is also a single father with a young son (Kim Kang-hoon) who was kidnapped at the amusement park for reasons unknown. Distraught and desperate, dad enlists the help of a loner-doctor (Kang Hye-jeong) specializing in lucid-dreaming. Dad also hires a guerilla dream-infiltrator (Park Yoo-chun) because he needs to get some answers fast before his little boy is... harvested for organs? shipped out to an orphanage as revenge? dead? The only difference between reality and dreams is that the second hand on your watch doesn't move in the latter realm. Is that true? Check your watch next time you're asleep. If you're strictly digital, you're probably screwed.