Sleep: simple in its basic description, elusive in attempts at a comprehensive understanding of all its manifestations. What happens behind closed eyes when we lose consciousness and give ourselves over to dreams? And how is our perception of reality changed when the line between waking and sleeping is blurred?
Only in sleep can you escape the logic of daily life… by forgetting and dreaming. But what if your sleep is so intense that it disrupts your daytime life? In the arms of Morpheus is a quest into the beauty and cruelty of sleep, into an irrational world that we cannot control, but that can control us.
Roselien is always tired and falls asleep everywhere. There is an effective medicine but at what cost? Emily is plagued by apocalyptic nightmares and aggression during her sleepwalking. A ritual seems to offer a solution.
Their stories are interwoven with a poet who spends her nights wandering through Brussels, a mother with a lifelike sleep paralysis and a musician with loud explosions in his head. One man has a dreamless sleep for no more than two hours and a waking life remains. Are you the one in your sleep or the person when you are awake? Is your daily life a consequence of how you got through the night or is your nightlife a processing of your daily existence?
The logic of the dream outweighs the reality of the documentary as In the Arms of Morpheus gradually turns into a stimulating mosaic of radical sleep experiences; true-to-life observations containing strange elements and a conversation which takes place in a dream of a burned-out house.
In an era in which efficiency and control are paramount, Marc Schmidt brings a cinematographic ode to the absurd and elusive sides of our existence.
2019 / Documentary / 82 minutes / Dutch with English Subtitles / A film by Marc Schmidt.
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