The first dream was about a communal camaraderie. The context was faded from memory when I woke up, but the pleasantry and feeling of cohesion persisted as I rose from bed when my 90 minute alarm went off.
The second dream was about an omniscient overview of a happy couple, which might have been myself and a past or future partner. I watched them meet and with their initial locking of eyes formed an empathy so deep, clean and evergreen that they never knew conflict in the love that lasted them the rest of their lives.
The third dream was.. that which my 90 minute alarm interrupted, so most of it evaporated with the shock of the sudden journey out of that oneiric utopia, but the calming pleasantness persisted.
The show itself, so far, isn't about any of those subjects. But it is, at least in the Mabel character, about giving strangers as much chance to be good human beings as you permit yourself, and to withhold judgment as long as can be.
I shan't attempt to intellectualize it any more than that.
Now I'm not a particularly, or let's be honest, a measurably at all, passive person. My social style mostly consists of telling people what to do, because they trust that I do know. It's worked for me since I was a little prodigy, and I'm not about to change it up now.
Consequently, 100% of my dreams are about control; the happy 90% where I have it in totality. The uncomfortable 8% where I share it. And the rest; nightmares.
This sort of happy-go-lucky, passive dream was an unprecedented experience, and the most any work has ever communicated its message, I should hope, with purity and indelible truth to me.
In technical terms, I shall say Gravity Falls uses its "camera" as a storytelling tool more precisely than most, if not all other comedy and animated shows; short decisive pans/tilts define the punchline. Telephoto compression underlines the humor beneath the frenetic action of a chase sequence, and such like.
It's a very frame-by-frame kind of show, meaning each cut brings new meaning and each shot is consciously designed from the mise-en-scene (in this case, shapes, sizes, color and positioning choices) to the light to lensing choice, to precisely elicit a calibrated emotional response.
It's a most perfectly-made work of art.
But what matters even more is the beauty beneath and between the frames.
As I haven't seen the whole thing yet, and parsed its overall meaning, I rate it 9/10.
