During the 1960s, New York musician Dion McGregor couch-surfed at a variety of friends’ homes. When he eventually moved in with fellow songwriter Mike Barr, the latter had no idea that when McGregor fell asleep, he would dream out loud – long and with surprising coherence. During the seven years that McGregor stayed in his home, Barr would regularly tiptoe into the living room where McGregor slept to tape record his surreal, comically absurd, and decadent excursions into the human subconscious. Hundreds of these recordings form the basis of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s fascinating documentary, in which they follow McGregor into a remarkable fantasy world that combines empathy, desire, and disgust. A sleeper famous even among the scientific community, his dreams involve attending to the practical details of a dwarf city, analyzing strange scientific experiments, observing wild orgies… Incorporating both intimacy and voyeurism, somniloquies is a captivating movie.In Somniloquies, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel overcome the boundaries between inner dreamscapes and human bodies.
