Clip joint: Dreams

This week's Clip joint is by Claire Ramtuhul, who blogs at CineVue and theculturecavern.blogspot.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @claireramtuhul.

Think you can do better than Claire? If you've got an idea for a future Clip joint, send a message to adam.boult@guardian.co.uk

Films in themselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on", sound and image conspiring to draw us into a whole new world of strange sensations that often reach an unimaginable scale. Perhaps that's why dreams offer such rich subject matter for film-makers, opening up a chance to explore both the effects of their craft and the hidden depths of the human mind. It's a state to which everyone can relate. We've all had a dream so vivid we can't help but tell the whole office the next day, or a nightmare that jolts us awake and leaves us breathless, even though we can't pin down what disturbed us in the first place.

1) Inception

OK, an obvious choice. But Inception is the ultimate in dream exploration on a blockbuster level. Though it confuses, it also delights, and Christopher Nolan perfectly captures the most baffling thing about the dream state: the unsettling sensation that "dreams feel real when we're in them". It's the incredible culmination of dream-inspired film-making, from the surreal worlds of Ingmar Bergman to the fledgling early Nolan in his first short, Doodlebug, and later Memento.

2) Mulholland Drive

The film's narrative is not so much non-linear as labyrinthine. David Lynch's surrealism is frightening in its fluidity, tricking the viewer by blending seeming reality with a dreamlike state. It seems to mirror the feeling of waking up from a dream that only comes back to you in disordered fragments throughout the day. It's Freudian, dark, twisted.

3) Brazil

Sam Lowry's recurring dream, in which he meets and falls in love with Jill Layton, is pure escapism from a dystopic world weighed down by stale bureaucracy. It's also super-kitsch dreaming in all its sickly-sweet gorgeousness, with angelic wings and candy floss clouds aplenty.

4) Aus dem Leben der Marionette

Clearly the inspiration for Nolan's "dream layers", Bergman uses a dream within a dream to explore the mental downfall of Peter Egerman. Perhaps it's all the more disturbing because it asks us to question how far our subconscious minds – a place where it is possible to think the unthinkable – can go.

5) The Matrix

Like Inception, the film delves into what would happen if we could harness the power of the dreamlike state, and whether we could control it to our advantage. The only thing is, in The Matrix, what has become accepted as reality is all one incredibly-crafted dream. And it takes a bit more than just a tiny red pill to pull you out of it …

Last week, Sophie Monks Kaufman selected clips of siren songs. Here are Claire's favourites from the thread.

1) As the subhuman pointed out, Lauren Bacall's sultry song in To Have and Have Not certainly got Humphrey Bogart hot under the collar. The pair were just beginning their offscreen love affair.

2) littleriver picked Brigitte Bardot at her coquettish best singing Je Ne Sais Pas in Doctor at Sea.

3) jamie12 went for a more subdued – but no less seductive – Scarlett Johansson singing karaoke to Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

4) MsSauerkraut took a toontastic approach with a clip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

5) One can't fail to be drawn in by Marlene Dietrich's elegant rendition of Quand L'Amour Meurt in Morocco, said secretcinema.