Mr. Sandman, Bring me a dream. Give him a pair of eyes with a 'come-hitler' gleam. Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci. And lots of wavy hair like Liberace.
I know how The Rise of the Guardians puts Jack Frost in the spotlight and everyone's swooning over him (cause nothing says hot better than an undead teenager who has silver hair and flies around bare-footed), but my attention was all over the dream team a.k.a Sandy and Pitch. (and bunny, but he's irrelevant to this post so we'll leave him out of the discussion, with north and big foot).
I find dreams generally very fascinating. Mainly because I get frustrated over not remembering my dream after the day progresses. I wake up fresh over a dream. It was a weird one. I remember the plot of the dream, and then I move about minding something else, eat breakfast, and then I try to recall the dream, but I can't. It's frustrating because I just remembered it 10 minutes ago. It's like the memory of the dream slipped out of the gate and flew away, rather than sinking in my brain. It's almost as if the memory itself doesn't want to be remembered, that it'd break the status quo if it did so, and I find that disturbing as much as it's fascinating.
Reality is an anchor. It's logic, it's strings of truth, it's a chain of events that conform each other's presence. You're tied to the ground because of two things: gravity and how real it is, and in my opinion, the reason the dreamscape exists is to break free from all of that. To exist a dimension that doesn't make sense, and you can't remember it vividly (at least not all), so that you don't confuse it with reality.
You sometimes remember bits and pieces of a dream. It my be lucid, but it's never a whole. You're never aware with everything that happens in the dream universe. Heck, you can't even think for yourself. It's always a reaction that is not thought through. It's always impulsive. And it's not until you wake up that you sense the strangeness of it all
— Wait, why was I running away from him? Why did I go that direction? Why did cry? Why was everyone looking at me like that? Why did I slap her in the face? Was I pregnant? Why did a bus fare costs $1000?
This dimension
—the reality
— revolves around logic and reason. We never stopped and reasoned in a dream, things just flowed. It isn't just me, everybody goes through the same thing...right?
I think nightmares are as important as dreams. I do. And I appreciate Pitch's vision on a child's growth through the nightmare he streams. The way I see it, the guardians only care about children, getting rotten teeth, hiding rotten eggs, they're all for children. Even Sandy probably just give imaginative sweet dream sequences for children. But pitch, he's always there. He'll give you nightmares no matter how old you are, and that just shows how much he cares.
When you wake up from a nightmare, what's the first thing you feel? Relief. That it's all a dream, that it's over, you're in reality now, and you can seek the comfort of human company. When you wake up from a sweet dream, you're disappointed because reality isn't as sweet as your dream, but nightmares, they make you appreciate reality no matter how much it sucks.
lbr, how many times have you dreamed of someone wanting to kill you? It's terrifying when you're in the nightmare, but when you wake up and you realize that nobody's actually coming to get you, and you're no longer alone, early monday mornings feels less crappy than usual.
which is why Pitch Black is my favourite character in Rise of the Guardians. The notion of infecting every child's dream with nightmares might seem evil, but really, he's doing a favor and making kids feel the horror of nightmares before the horror of the real world falls upon them. A head start in life. If you keep dreaming of prince charming on a white horse, chances are you'll be disappointed with the fact that life doesn't actually work that way.
but a dark knight on a dark horse. Now that's something else.