The Dreamer Explains His Reality Theory, Explained：crossed my mind

What's really going on

This is a monologue with almost no plot, and it works because of how completely the man commits to it. He starts from a dream — an empty world, like The Omega Man — and builds a whole metaphysics out of it: "every thought you have creates its own reality." The film backs him up with a visual joke, cutting between the cab and the imagined world at the bus station where the woman he never met is waiting. What makes the speech more than a joke is the regret underneath it. He says he is broke and "should've done that probably," and by the end the theory is really about all the lives he is not living. "Man, shit. I should've stayed at the bus station." The film's slacker philosophy is stated here at its most complete: a world where every possibility happens except, somehow, the one you wanted.

Theme

このチャプターで学べること

• A cab ride becomes a lecture on parallel lives.
• Every unmade choice is, to him, a whole other movie.
• The driver barely speaks, and that silence is the joke.
• His theory ends where it began: back at the bus station.

発音のポイント

• remember 'em — Blend remember and 'em so they sound like one word.
• should've done — Should've reduces to a light should-uv, with done unstressed.
• hitting it — In American speech the tt in hitting flaps, close to a d sound.