I had a strange dream about this movie the other night

@megan. It sounds as though in your dream you fused Marion's and Vera's stories (although Norman/mother looking directly into the camera after killing is a further twist; you dream is quite creative!). I'm not sure that I've ever had a dream like that about Psycho or any other film, but I can say that I've found myself confabulating scenes in movies that aren't there, e.g., I *seem* to remember seeing in Hitchcock's NbNW that Cary Grant has liquor forced down his throat but when you review the film we in fact never see that. And, a very famous case of mass confabulation, I like lots of people seem to remember a scene from Moonraker (1979) where the villain Jaws and a small cute blond girl grin at each other revealing that both have clunky braces on their teeth, but in fact no such scene exists. The gag as described is so obvious that lots of human minds evidently auto-completed it into existence! And doubtless there are lots of other cases of this sort of thing. The human mind whether awake or asleep *is* pretty active and creative, constantly filling in backgrounds seamlessly for us as our eyes which have very small focal areas saccade around 3-5 times a second without our noticing and everything gets magically stitched together in real time for us as something like an unbroken panorama. When we sleep and dream our eyes saccade around like mad things (the famous REM - rapid eye movement) so it's a dead certainty that the same generative mechanisms that construct our sense of a persisting reality when we're awake *are* at work fabricating dream realities out of our memories, wishes, etc..

In the dream, Marion Crane actually leaves the motel alive, but for some reason, decides to come back. She's carrying her suitcase, and hears a strange noise down in the basement. She goes down to see what's going on. Norman out of nowhere, comes out and kills her, and stares right into the camera!

---

That sounds pretty damn scary and-- as swanstep notes elsewhere -- rather a merging of Janet Leigh's story and Vera Mile's story in the basement/fruit cellar.

---

Anybody else have any strange Psycho dreams/nightmares? Or from any other horror movie?

----

In 1967, local TV commericals promoting a broadcast of Psycho had the announcer yell:

"See the movie that gave the nation NIGHTMARES! Psycho on the Saturday Night movie."

"Gave the nation nightmares!". How alliterate.

I'll bet that Psycho DID give a lot of people nightmares in its initial 1960 release in the censored movie world of that year.

I never had a nightmare that took place IN the world of Psycho.

But over the decades, I have had MANY dreams in which I'm watching TV and they show Psycho, and it has little do with the movie as we know it. Like the house and the hill look wrong. And its a different shower. And new/different scenes take place. And of course - being a dream -- its all very quick and fragmented, hardly the length of any real movie.

Which reminds me: one critic wrote of Van Sant's 1998 shot-by-shot remake of Psycho: "It is as if someone dreamed a new version of the movie." Fair enough. The house is certainly different, as are the looks of the characters.