Dreams

This episode of John Nesbitt's long-running series for MGM concerns dreams -- you might have guessed that from the title. It offers three dreams, a couple of them common anxiety dreams that you might have had yourself. The third is one that this short claims that Abraham Lincoln had.

Was it prophetic, or just another anxiety dream? I think it's the latter, but you can't get much dramatic tension out of pure rationality, can you?

Fans of old movies and new will take some pleasure in knowing that one of the dreamers shown is Johnny Arthur, a comic actor of the silent and sound eras; another is Peter Cushing, only 27 years old, but instantly recognizable. The performer playing Lincoln is uncredited.

This short subject from John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series is way too short and superficial to offer anything beyond some entertainment value about Dreams. The consensus is that dreaming is a safety valve of the mind allowing us to act out in ways we can't do in reality.

There's also some theories that dreams can be prophetic. The case of Abraham Lincoln's dream about his own demise is cited. Years later after this film was out it was reported that Harry Truman had a dream vision of his mother who had just died in 1946.

There's a lot in this world unknown and unexplored, but this is way too simplistic a film for serious study.