True Dreams

How many movies have you seen where at the end the main character wakes up, causing he and the audience to simultaneously realize that everything they witnessed beforehand was "just a dream?" This film takes that principal but instead of deceiving, the story invites you to watch the main characters dream away. With "True Dreams," Allen takes the term dream sequence to a whole new level: he lets his audience in on the joke, while they watch the two main characters run around unaware of the reality/fantasy of their surroundings. It's pretty clear from the start that Colby and Liz have both fallen asleep and are dreaming. But whose dream is it? And which city does this dream take place in, New York, or Baltimore? Within the context of these dreams, we also see flashbacks of how the couple met and ultimately broke up. These episodes, existing within Liz and Colby's dreams, also suggest that, all along, like Edgar Allan Poe's famous quote, their "[lives are] nothing but a dream within a dream."