By Adam Sheldon, Director
My five-year-old woke up early this morning and said, “Aren’t dreams cool?”
One of those perfect small-human moments that pulls the brakes on your adult brain and reminds you the world is far stranger, softer, and more astonishing than we give it credit for. Naturally, it sent me spiralling into the sort of half-serious, half-silly existential pondering you get before the first coffee: why do we dream? And why do they feel so damn real?
In the moment, a dream isn’t a dream. It’s Tesco, where [hypothetically] you are suddenly naked from the waist down. Or it’s you gently rocking your baby daughter to sleep… except she has the face of Gary from over the road. That one wasn’t hypothetical. And yes, it was deeply disturbing.
Dreams help us sort the chaos: the past, the worries, the what-ifs. A kind of overnight housekeeping for the soul. And as I was packing lunchboxes and trying not to think about Gary-baby, it hit me: that’s exactly what films and television do for us too.
They’re our collective daydreams.
A shared imagination.
A social story we tell ourselves.
When we watch a film, we get to step into lives we’ll never live. Be a murderer, an astronaut, a hero, or someone who follows a magical ring for ten hours without a single friend questioning their time-management skills. Cinema gives us consequence-free exploration; space to feel something, reconsider something, escape something, or discover something we didn’t know about our own lives.
It’s why we often leave the cinema feeling changed, even if we don’t have the words for it. The lights come up, the popcorn tub is empty, and suddenly the world feels… reassembled. Tilted slightly. Understood differently. Not because the film told us what to think, but because it nudged us into a new perspective - one we might not have given ourselves otherwise.
Films about affairs, revolutions, love, loss, misplaced babies with Gary’s face… they let us sit with realities we may never personally experience. Sometimes that brings comfort: My life isn’t so bad after all. Sometimes it sparks courage: Maybe things don’t have to stay the way they are. Sometimes it even stops us doing something truly unwise: Maybe I won’t murder someone today.
That’s the quiet power of storytelling.
It rearranges the mental furniture.
It gives us permission to dream while we’re awake.
And honestly, I think we need that more than ever. Not just for distraction, but to remind ourselves we’re capable of imagining something better, and then building it. Maybe that’s why I’ve ended up watching so many films about the birth of trade unions recently. There’s something stirring about seeing what humans can do when they organise, hope, and take action. I’m also rewatching The League of Gentlemen. I’ll let someone else interpret what that says about me.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for indulging the early-morning brainworm. And if you’re in the mood for a powerful documentary about collective action and the grit of ordinary people, watch Harlan County, USA. It’s cinema vérité at its absolute best, and a proper call-to-action for anyone who believes stories can shift the world.
At Big Egg, that’s why we make films: not just to entertain, but to help people see differently, and dream a bit bigger while they’re wide awake.
