If you're at the theatre and the movie you're watching feels like a nightmare, you've probably wandered into Serendipity.  But if the images on the screen make you feel as though you're floating through someone else's loopy dream, you must be watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life. It's a terrific new picture that, despite playing tricks with your eyes and making your head hurt as you begin to obsess about your own dreams, is worth every single, precious minute.

Unconventional in just about every way possible, Life is the first animated feature to be shot on digital video.  If the previous sentence makes little sense to you, you're not alone.  Here's the deal: Linklater (The Newton Boys) filmed his own script with handheld digital cameras, edited it, and then turned it over to an animation team that used rotoscoping software to trace over the video images.  The result is like a watercolor painting come to life.  It's amazing.  It's breathtaking.  It's hell-a-cool.

The story itself, which actually barely matters here, is really just dozens of vignettes that feature an unnamed protagonist played by Wiley Wiggins (he had a small part in Linklater's Dazed and Confused), a college grad stumbling from one wacky encounter to the next.  Everyone he meets has a story to tell or some type of unsolicited diatribe to pitch.  Eventually, he realizes it's all a dream and fights to wake up, only to learn he was in a dream within a dream.

Seemingly unable to really wake up, the young man tries to understand the meaning of dreams and, of course, everyone is willing to lay polysyllabic explanations at his feet.  Each has their own crackpot theory - some are pretentiously absurd and some are thought-provoking.  Like I said earlier, though, none of it matters because you'll be so entirely hypnotized by the visuals.

Part of me wonders if Linklater made the dialogue easy to ignore on purpose. We're talking about lines like "I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes."  It's like a frigging college lecture - who's going to pay attention to that?  Is somebody more likely to remember the heady dialogue or the scene where The Cruise's Timothy "Speed" Levitch materializes like the Great Gazoo when the main character is on what appears to be the Brooklyn Bridge?

One of the most enjoyable things about Life is its lack of continuity.  Many animators worked on the various vignettes, leaving each to look quite different than the next.  Some scenes resemble blurry live-action, while some use the animation to exaggerate facial expressions and manipulate the backgrounds in various ways.  You never know what you're going to see in the next episode.

Linklater used mostly non-actors in Life, so don't bother trying to figure out who everybody is.  There are a handful you might recognize, like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who reprise their roles from Linklater's Before Sunrise.  One scene features Nicky Katt and Adam Goldberg, and there are two directors in the film, too.  Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) stops by for an animated cameo, and Linklater himself is in the final scene, where the protagonist tracks him down to find out when he's going to wake up.  How's that for trippy?

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for language and some violent images