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Waking Life

An unnamed young man lives an ethereal existence that lacks transitions between everyday events and eventually progresses toward an existential crisis. He observes quietly but later participates actively in philosophical discussions involving other characters—ranging from quirky scholars and artists to everyday restaurant-goers and friends—about such issues as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy, and the meaning of life. Other scenes do not include the protagonist but rather focus on an isolated person, a group of people, or a couple engaging in such topics from a disembodied perspective. Along the way, the film also touches upon existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming, and references various intellectual and literary figures by name.

Gradually, the protagonist realizes that he is living out a perpetual dream, broken up only by occasional false awakenings. So far, he is mostly a passive onlooker, though this changes during a chat with a passing woman who suddenly approaches him. After she greets him and shares her creative ideas with him, he reminds himself that she is a figment of his own dreaming imagination. Afterward, he starts to converse more openly with other dream characters, but begins to despair about being trapped in a dream.

The protagonist's final talk is with a character (played by Linklater) whom he briefly encountered earlier in the film. This conversation reveals this other character's view that reality may be only a single instant that a person interprets falsely as time (and, thus, life); that living is simply the person's constant negation of God's invitation to become one with the universe; that dreams offer a glimpse into the infinite nature of reality; and that to be free from the illusion called life, one need only accept God's invitation.

The protagonist is last seen walking into a driveway, when he suddenly begins to levitate, paralleling a scene at the start of the film of a floating boy in the same driveway. The protagonist uncertainly reaches for a car door handle but is too swiftly lifted above the vehicle and over the trees. He rises into the endless blue expanse of the sky until he disappears from view.