Dreams That Money Can Buy 1947

Joe Jack Bittner is an ordinary man who has just signed a complicated lease on a room. As he ponders how to pay the rent, he discovers a strange gift: when he looks into his own eyes in a mirror, he can see the contents of his mind unfolding. This realization leads him to a bold idea—to use his talent to help others by selling tailor-made dreams. He sets up shop in his room and begins a surreal enterprise, promising to deliver personalized dreams to a growing and restless clientele. The premise rests on a provocative conceit: a single real-world impulse—a desire for escape or fulfillment—can be translated into a dreamscape that feels almost like a private film, crafted with images that feel both intimate and alien.

If you can look inside yourself, you can look inside anyone!

Across seven dream sequences, each session becomes a window into a different psyche, a mosaic of modernist imagination turned into cinema. The first case pits Mr A Samuel Cohen and Mrs A Ethel Beseda in a consultation that quickly spirals into a tableau of memory, longing, and literalized imagery. Mr A is a methodical bank clerk whose ledger-like mind harbors a collage of provocative pictures: a reclining woman on a bed, an old man on a lap, a figure attacked by an animal-headed assailant, a stream of red liquid passing through water, and a melting wax figure. Joe conjures a dream from these fragments—titled “Desire”—where a white-clad woman lies under a red-curtained four-poster, a small golden ball slides from her mouth, and jail bars rise around her bed as a voyeur watches from behind them. The dream shifts as a formal authority figure—portrayed by Max Ernst—appears and interacts with the unfolding scene, while the voyeur’s presence threads through the room, the couple moves through a stairwell of steam, and the nightingales and calves’ hooves drift into the mood of a cinematic fever dream. The narrator’s voice hints at the intimate exchange behind the doors, and the feverish fantasy closes with the woman tossing the golden ball into the air.

In the second case, Case number two, the young woman known as Julie Julie Lary enters with a briefcase, wearing a suit, glasses, and a beret. She attempts to enlist Joe in a kaleidoscope of causes, pushing him toward an arrangement that would sign away his autonomy as a patient. A shifting chorus—voices and a repeated wolf-whistle over a light jazz mood—accompanies the flirtation, hesitations, and near-kiss, until smoke swirls away to reveal a disembodied mannequin head and a cascade of wigged, costumed mannequins that seem to dance in a showroom. Libby Holman Libby Holman and Josh White Josh White lend their voices to the score, with Norma Cazanjian Norma Cazanjian and Doris Okerson Doris Okerson accompanying them. The dream riffs on consumer fantasy and artificial intimacy, culminating in a moment where Julie is offered a cascade of glittering jewelry and then kisses Joe before departing again, leaving Mrs A to wade through the reverberations of the encounter.

Case three unfolds as a tense encounter with Mrs A once more. She pays in cash for another visit, and the room becomes a stage for a dream about a young couple reading aloud from a book to a crowd. The scene gathers into a film-screen ambience, with the crowd imitating the gestures of a man on screen. Hidden on the back cover of a book titled Ruth, Roses and Revolvers is a photograph of Man Ray, and the image of wounded soldiers materializes in the reverie. The debt of memory and the lure of danger are palpable as Mrs A’s emotions surge, and the room outside erupts in riot as a policeman’s figure remains impotently posed. Into this chaos steps Case number four—a gangster—who hopes to exploit the same dream-for-hire service to win horse races. The vision offered to him is a hall of spinning discs and a distorted, Duchamp-inspired take on Nude Descending a Staircase. The robbery follows, and a policeman briefly appears—thwarted by a gun license that the gangster produces before he makes his escape, leaving Joe unconscious on the floor.

The fifth and sixth cases bring in a blind man and a little girl. Anthony Laterie Anthony Laterie plays the blind man who arrives with a dream he believes he can sell, while the little girl—an enigmatic figure in the office—activates a playful display of Calder-like mobiles and a somber mask that observes the mêlée. Joe, waking from the chaos, negotiates a new purchase and accepts the visionary repertory of these two visitors, allowing the wild imaginings to bloom into an experiential reality within the room.

The seventh case returns to Joe himself. The buzzer goes unanswered, and the next client turns out to be Joe in a startling self-portrait. Frozen in ice, he holds a blue poker chip left by the little girl and steps into an autobiographical dream that plays out around a poker table guarded by a classical bust that recalls Morpheus in silhouette. A glass shatters as a liquefied moment spills across the table, and Joe’s skin turns a startling shade of blue, drawing a chorus of rejection from his friends. The tabletop animals and figures come alive, the room closes in, and a blue thread of hope appears as a physical cord that he follows outdoors. The world around him swells with protest and defiance, ladders stretch toward the sky in every direction, and Joe climbs, recalling the chorus of postwar optimism. The ladders vanish, and he finds a window to escape, only to be met by a living room of color and danger. A reclining woman offers him a drink, cherries, and a knife. He kisses her, then cuts the symbolic blue thread, which bleeds red, and the escape rope is cut by the very person who helped him escape. The scene spirals into a final, surreal cascade: the bearded bust bursts into flames, Joe’s friends reappear as flaming bird cages, and his attempt to flee ends with the behemoth statue, ink-blot colors, and a downpour that coats the pavement with shifting hues, the stony gaze of the broken classical bust fixed on the spectacle above.

The work as a whole offers a relentlessly inventive fusion of mind, image, and performance, drawing on a spectrum of modernist aesthetics—from the sharp, enigmatic imagery of the early dream landscapes to the playful-but-haunting logic of the toy-like tableaux, and finally to a self-reflexive meditation on memory, identity, and the lure of escape. The film’s kaleidoscopic logic keeps the viewer guessing, balancing whimsy and unease as it follows Joe’s unorthodox enterprise from an impulsive experiment in dream-wielding to a crisis where the boundaries between dream, desire, and self collapse into a single, hypnotic vision.

• The cameos and performances include Stanley Kubrick as Theatre Extra, a nod to cinema history, and the dream-logic collaborations that feature John La Touche as The Gangster, a figure who embodies the collision of art, crime, and spectacle. The musical textures weave through the world with the voices of Libby Holman and Josh White, supported by Norma Cazanjian and Doris Okerson, and occasionally punctuated by the sly, sculptural presence of Max Ernst as Le President, a symbolic avatar of power and intrusion in the dreamscape. The entire venture is anchored by the quiet, incisive presence of Jack Bittner as Joe, whose ordinary life dissolves into a labyrinth of visions, and by the occasional, shattering in-person interventions of the other players who drift in and out of the room, each leaving a trace of the impossible in the waking world.