Another fantastic story on the topic of time travel – the film Flashback / The Education of Fredrick Fitzell – was released in June 2021. The main character, Fred Fitzell, realizes that the present in which he lives is not the only one. He is faced with different options for the future, and he must choose one of them. The filmmakers tried to dismantle the concept of linear time by painting a picture of parallel time points between which it is possible to move.
One of the scenes in the film echoes a dream sequence: Fred and Andre are talking, sitting on the couch, and everything is ordinary, but suddenly Andre starts talking as if he is 17 (although the characters are 30). As the director of the film, Chris MacBride, said in an interview with The GEEKiary, “the feeling of disorientation is vivid in the scene.” Fred is confused by what is happening. This “sometimes happens in dreams when things are a little off but you still think it’s normal. It slowly leads to a bigger thing that’s off and gives it a sort of lucid dreaming flow,” added Chris.
This theme appears in the film for a reason. MacBride himself was an active practitioner of lucid dreaming (LD) in his youth and read all of Carlos Castaneda’s books. “In order to really do lucid dreaming, it’s something you have to practice and work at. In your daily waking life, you have to always ask yourself if you’re dreaming and have little things you do so that it becomes a habit. So when you’re dreaming you hope that habit kicks in,” he shared his personal experience.
However, having mastered the practice, Chris stopped lucid dreaming. As he explained, it was initially exciting, but later became terrifying because, being lucid in a dream, he found himself unable to wake up. It got to the point where he was afraid to fall asleep, and eventually decided to quit his LD induction habits. Nevertheless, the idea of lucid dreaming has been an influence on his work, as reflected in the plot of the new film.
The film was released on June 4, 2021 and is available on digital platforms: for example, Amazon, iTunes and Google Play.
