Monk Heyman is a working-class New Jersey toll collector, obsessive filmmaker, and compulsive screenwriter whose grand cinematic ambitions have produced twenty-seven unproduced screenplays, a strained relationship with his actress partner Shelley, and a growing conviction that his eccentricities are actually the hallmarks of genius. When Shelley pushes him to confront his debilitating sleep problems, Monk undergoes testing at the Konklin Center and is diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. During treatment, however, something extraordinary happens: for the first time in years, Monk experiences vivid dreams and the clinic's neuro-magnetic technology captures them as astonishingly detailed visual data. When Monk and his lifelong collaborator Willie discover that the recordings can be reconstructed as extraordinarily high-resolution moving images, Monk realizes he has stumbled upon a revolutionary new form of filmmaking: movies generated directly from the human subconscious, without cameras, sets, actors, or conventional production technology.
What begins as a breakthrough quickly becomes an obsession. Monk and Willie attempt to transform the captured dreams into a viable cinematic pipeline, while Monk's increasingly unconventional experiments push Shelley, their relationship, and the boundaries of artistic ownership to the breaking point. The technology ultimately produces a spectacular film built from Monk's subconscious, while Shelley undergoes her own radical transformation after being exposed to the same process. As the dream-generated images attract international acclaim?including a stunning reception at Cannes?the question of who owns a person's dreams, and therefore the images created from them, becomes a legal and commercial battle. The conflict culminates in corporate and legal negotiations over the ownership of the dream-generated material, while Shelley ultimately walks away from the exploitative film world and Monk emerges with a new understanding of his extraordinary?and potentially dangerous?creative discovery.
