Dream Logic: David Lynch viewed the world differently – and dared audiences to do the same

Where others saw the mundane, David Lynch imagined what lies beyond. We celebrate the life of a director, artist and musician whose extraordinary films were born out of a fascination with the innate strangeness of the everyday.

Growing up in 1950s post-war America, David Lynch’s childhood in many ways sounded idyllic. “Picket fences, blue skies, red flowers and cherry trees,” is how he described it in an interview in 1982. “But then I would see millions of little ants swarming on the cherry tree.” 

A mutated version of this image would come to fruition years later in his 1986 film Blue Velvet when Jeffrey Beaumont, played by long-time collaborator Kyle MacLachlan, returns to his hometown of Lumberton to discover, nestled deep in green grass, a severed human ear swarming with ants.

Such vivid, otherworldly, nightmarish and hallucinatory images came to define much of Lynch’s work through his incredible film career, spanning the likes of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. So much so that he spawned his own mood board-cum-genre: “Lynchian”. To use the term, as countless do every single day, is to conjure a kind of surrealism and dream logic, and open a Pandora’s box of free-form abstract narratives, deeply atmospheric music, dark rooms, red curtains, shady figures, women in trouble, backwards-talking characters, and oxygen-huffing maniacs.  

Despite this, so much of what Lynch created was often rooted in the kind of day-to-day living that most would find prosaic – perhaps boring. During his years living in Philadelphia, where many people may walk past a dilapidated old factory without a second thought, Lynch saw something akin to a renaissance painting in all the billowing smoke, blackened steel and towering chimney stacks. This became not just a backdrop, but a foundational aesthetic, to his debut film Eraserhead. During this same period, he lived opposite a morgue and grew fascinated by the body bags he saw, once recalling seeing the image of them being cleaned out with hoses: “with the zipper open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like these big smiles,” he said. “I called them the smiling bags of death.” A lugubrious image that captures his delightfully warped and strangely endearing sense of humour – but also something you can’t help but recall when confronted with the haunting image of high school student Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic, washed up on the lake shore in the pilot of Twin Peaks. 

Lynch could extract the bizarre and fantastical from the mundane, pluck darkness from light, manifest beauty from the conventionally ugly, and create chaos from supposed order. Lynch himself was a slave to routine. He loved it so much that he used to dread weekends because that broke the rhythm of a working day and deprived him of having his team close by. He didn’t go on holiday for the same reason. For years he went to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant every day to drink the same milkshake, he ate the same meal every single day, meditated twice daily, and he wore the exact same clothes. At one point Lynch even began to question his bordering-on-obsessive routine. “I once considered psychoanalysis to talk to somebody about these cycles of things like [repetitive] lunches,” he said. “I asked the man, ‘could meeting with you affect my creativity?’ and he said, ‘I have to be honest, it could,’ and I said ‘thank you very much, goodbye.’”

By enforcing the strictures of a predictable schedule, Lynch carved out a space to do the two most important things in his life: work and dream. Daydreaming was hugely significant to Lynch. The ability to drift off, search, get lost, linger, and float in these liminal dream-like spaces that permeated so much of his work on screen. By keeping the humdrum of daily life so simple, so manageable, he allowed himself to ceaselessly explore an unencumbered artistic landscape. “When there’s some sort of order there, you’re free to mentally go off any place,” he said. “You’ve got a safe foundation and a place to spring off from. The purer the environment, the more fantastic the interior world can be.”  

Lynch spent years locked away in his Mulholland Drive compound in LA with a setup that meant he could work on films, music, paintings, sculpture, or any other thing he may impulsively be drawn to, at a moment’s notice and with ease. His ex-studio manager and musical collaborator Dean Hurley once told me about Lynch’s endless “pie-in-the-sky ideas” that he may excitedly and unexpectedly come up with, like one day querying what would it take for him to drill for oil in his backyard. “Then somebody has to look all that up and make a report,” Hurley added. Lynch would only leave his complex for work purposes and created a kind of air-tight container to explore the reaches of his imagination, with little, if any, outside influence. 

Which of course is what makes his films so remarkably distinct. They come purely from a place within him. “I have not seen anything for years and I am not really a movie buff,” Lynch told The Telegraph in 2017. “I love to make them, but I don’t really see a lot of films.” This was around the time he released the groundbreaking Twin Peaks: The Return. Surely he’d been swatting up, immersing himself in the purported golden age of TV in the streaming era? Nope. “And I don’t watch much TV,” he continued. “Except I have been watching this Velocity Channel, where they have car shows and customise and restore cars. I have learned so much – the metal work and the upholstery and the engine work that these guys and gals do is thrilling to me. A lot of these people are real artists.”

With this context you start to understand why Lynch why his work has continued to resonate throughout decades of drastically shifting styles, technologies and fashions. When he released Eraserhead in 1977, it was shown at midnight screenings in theatres, frying the minds of those who saw it with such an electric intensity that the film was spoken about in hushed tones as though it was folklore – or an urban myth. It set the tone for Lynch releasing something that was era-defining, often generation-defining, at least once a decade for the next ensuing half a century. That is a near unprecedented thing to do in the world of cinema. And it was made possible because of his steadfast commitment to creating art on his own terms and in his own way. As Lynch said himself in the 2017 documentary The Art Life: “I didn’t want to be anywhere in this world that’s not my world.”