Waking Life

Symptomatology The main character within The Waking Life is one who is active within an environment and seemingly fully conscious of the world around himself. However throughout the course of the film, several events lead the viewer to believe he is “stuck” within his own perception, unable to “wake up” from a cyclitic existence of relevant experiences. The film uses notions of a lucid dream to represent the dissociative nature of his experiences throughout the film, questioning whether he is wake or asleep, essentially stuck in a dream. Within this dream, visual distortions are present, not typical of the type of hallucinations that occur with an episode of psychosis, but rather a cloudy, uncertain series of visual concepts being crudely represented. The main character, who is never named, serves as a placeholder for a man with a dissociative disorder, specifically Depersonalization disorder. Treatment Treatment for Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder is under-studied and considered a…

There were few there. Those in attendance felt the greatest pain. I had not stepped foot in a church since my mother, but I had to close this chapter. I was not an evil person; I was just madly confused. We are all products of our history and future. If I had not experienced what I have or thought about my life a certain way, I would not have caused the pain I created. I was just a drop in Anna’s pail of sorrows but I was that drop too many, just like the alcohol in my father’s veins. The small…

A Walk Through Roethke’s Work “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke is very diverse. Instead of the poem referring to someone waking from sleeping, it refers to someone waking from several realizations about life. The poem is written in first person, therefore, the author is also the speaker. The setting of the poem could take place within a person’s figurative heart or mind. Roethke’s purpose was to show how we become more open-minded through the practice of metaphorically sleeping and waking.…

The feeling of waking up from the coziness of the covers with no desire to leave for fear of the unavoidable goose bumps the morning air brings causes a person to dart for the heater, to feel the warmth while the coldness slowly fades away. This crisp feeling the cold brings makes the warmth that much more of a fulfilling sensation. The season that allows a person to no longer feel inconvenienced with their wardrobe but to have the satisfaction of the simple comfort of a knit sweater. The aroma…

movement” (Hughes 11). Hughes, here, creates an image of an animal running around a forest barely seen. Or an idea running around the brain which you cannot quite catch in its full form. Until, of course, he finally does. Interestingly, when he is finally able to see the fox, he watches it create prints in the snow. The fox, the thought, has made an imprint on his mind. This, therefore, leads to a total transformation of the mind, which Hughes foreshadows with “a body that is bold to come”…

Dreams provide a contented escape from it. People can also create various goals and ambitions to help them achieve greatness in the world that everyone occupies. People can do what they please and be what they want without any consequences. Dreams allow people to do whatever they want, create goals and ambitions, and offer an escape to a different reality from the tragic, cruel world that people live in today. As children, people wish for the most bizarre, ludicrous commodities in life.…

In the movie, Waking Life, there are many scenes that describe and demonstrate existentialism. Once such scene begins with a tattered pirate flag that is hung off a boat being used as a car. Within the scene the driver gives a lecture to the main character about life and existentialistic ideas. The scene ends when the other passenger gives direction on where to drop off the main character. This scene illustrates the idea that man is constantly inventing man because of its dialogue, different art…

In the movie “Waking Life” the philosophical idea that stood out the most to me was the idea of free will. In the movie, one of the characters explains the concept of free will and the debate amongst philosophers about whether it exists or not. The man poses the question “how can we really be free if God already knows in advance what we are going to do?”. This is a very heavy question and very hard to answer, but it got me thinking, does God really know everything that we are going to do? There…

People can either enjoy life taking it slow, while others can be can completely indifferent to all it’s beauty, and thus taking life for granted. In the poem “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, it is communicated that spring is deceiving and it is shown that there is no point to life. “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke is more about going with the flow and appreciating life as is. The poems are similar because they both approach death and what is to come. Whereas, the two poems are different in…

"The Waking," a poem written by Theodore Roethke, is an immersive poem that allows readers the experience of Roethke's understanding of his own life, but also the very way of it. There is an extremely strong sense of emotion throughout this poem which also contributes to the continuous repetition of certain lines such as, "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow." (line 1). This repetition of lines proves one of the main points of the poem in which creativity comes to everyone in their own way.…