Dreaming in Avatar

Daniel Walden and Helena Poch's Psychoanalysis of Dreams: Dream Theory and Its Relationship to Literature and Popular Culture: Freud, Billy Joel, Appelfeld, and Abe analyzes the importance of dreams in literature. It claims that the "connection between literature and dream analysis" is "interwoven," but also that "dreams cannot be interpreted directly." One piece of media that involves dream sequences is James Cameron's Avatar. While it is not directly about dreams that one might have while they are sleeping, Avatar send its characters through wild out of body experiences where their minds experience realities separate of their bodies.

Avatar is a science fiction film about a group of humans that attempt to gather
information and resources from a foreign planet and from its inhabitants, the Na'vi. The protagonist, Jake Sulley, is sent on a mission to befriend the Na'vi and to aid in communication between the two groups. Sulley is able to do this buy using a Na'vi suit that allows him to openly explore the terrain and speak the local language. Sulley is able to control this suit remotely, such that his mind and his consciousness exist in the suit, while his body might exist somewhere some distance away.

Sulley particularly enjoys using this Na'vi suit because it grants him the ability to walk, where normally his legs are paralyzed. This is particularly important because the sense of freedom that he feels in the suit impacts his overall impression of the Na'vi people. Sulley feels free to run and move and live in the suit, and subsequently enjoys interacting and living with the Na'vi. This fact eventually ends up impacting the plotline of the movie: Sulley turns against the humans and ends up fighting for the Na'vi and their planet.

The dream sequences that Sulley experiences are Walden and Poch's piece is relevant to Avatar because it represents how Sulley should have interpreted the situation (if he had wanted to be scientifically accurate). Sulley loves the mobility that the Na'vi suit gives him and he also loves the kindness and generosity of the Na'vi people, but the connection between these two is never fully explored, and Sulley never considers it. The movie briefly touches on the fact that Sulley enjoys spending time in the suit because it does allow him to walk, but it does not discuss the fact that his new ability to walk may have shaped his impression of the people. Sulley does not seem to make a distinction between the enjoyment that he gets out of wearing the suit and the enjoyment that he gets from interacting from the Na'vi people. The article reads "dreams cannot be interpreted directly," when in fact, this is exactly what Sulley is doing.