“I’m gonna tell you about a dream I once had,” Richard Linklater – playing himself in his own film Waking Life – tells Wiley Wiggins, playing the film’s unnamed protagonist. “I know when someone says that usually you’re in for a very boring next few minutes, and you might be,” Linklater adds as he hammers away at a pinball machine. “But it sounds like … what else you gonna do, right?”
On paper, that’s the premise – and, if you’re cynical, the central dilemma – of Linklater’s 2001 genre-defying indie masterpiece. Wiggins plays a man wandering around Austin, Texas, who is uncertain whether he’s awake or asleep. He may be stuck in a dream, unable to wake up – or reality might just be this weird.
