“Knowing” – Only a dream could be so nonsensical.

What the hell did I just watch? Seriously, someone please convince me that this film (read: huh?) wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Maybe it was just a dream. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve had dreams like this; convoluted, all over the map, a famous person involved, and spaceships. I feel better now, so let me tell you about this crazy dream I had.

The dream starts with a classroom full of kids drawing pictures to put in a 50-year time capsule. One girl writes a series of numbers covering both sides of the paper and the teacher snatches it away from her just before completing it. Oddly, when we see the paper again, there’s no line off the edge of the paper from the girl’s still-moving pencil. Either that teacher has the best timing ever or my dream made a mistake.

Anyway, my dream skips ahead fifty years, just in time for me to see them opening the time capsule. As luck would have it, Nicholas Cage’s (aha! the famous person!) son gets the envelope with the numbers. Luckier still, Cage is a professor of astrophysics at MIT, so I know I won’t have to wait long for him to decrypt the numbers. Roughly fourteen seconds later, he figures out that the numbers list disasters and accidents by date and number of deaths. How does he do this? By getting drunk and spilling whiskey on the sheet in the shape of his glass. What will my brain think of next?

Cage uses red and blue circles to mark all of the dates and deaths, creating what should be a very consistent picture. Except, when we see his circles on the white board, there are clearly gaps in the sequencing, as well as random blue circles. I never realized how detailed my dreams are, or that they make such obvious continuity errors.

After finishing his booze (and circles) Cage realizes there are three disasters that have yet to occur. I’m hoping I get to see them before I wake up, because I’m sure they’ll have great special effects. After the first two disasters occurred, I wasn’t disappointed; the effects were fantastic. Unfortunately, it was hard to enjoy them because my brain decided to mix in vampires and religion. As it turned out they weren’t vampires, but they looked just like the guys from “The Lost Boys.”

Eventually, Cage tracks down the daughter (Diana) of the girl that wrote the numbers and together (read: Cage) figures out that the sun is going to release a massive coronal ejection which will kill everything on Earth. He does this by looking at a religious picture that Diana’s daughter was coloring. Without the aid of alcohol (this time), he also figures out that there were more numbers that didn’t get written down. These numbers are important because they tell him where would be the best place to die.

The numbers he didn’t circle are GPS coordinates (yes, my dreams are very technological) for all of the tragic events and this last number is where the aliens will be to keep them safe. The aliens are the Lost Boys who had been trying to kidnap Cage and Diana’s kids. At this point, I almost woke up because Diana’s car gets smashed into by a semi truck and she is killed. I stayed brave though and saw it out to the end.

Cage arrives at the location to find the kids safe and the Lost Boys calling their space ship. Cage convinces the kids to leave, the aliens turn into angels and dozens of ships leave the Earth (hopefully, carrying more than two kids each). I finally woke up just after the Earth is destroyed by the ejection and catch a glimpse of the two kids running to that tree from “The Fountain” through the fields of “Gladiator.”

Like all dreams, as soon as I woke up it began to fade, so I quickly wrote down some things that didn’t make sense. If the aliens knew the future, why did they wait until the last minute to help anyone, leaving only some random numbers for them decipher? On that note, why did they pick a kid who was going to bury the numbers for fifty years? Did the aliens give the same numbers to everyone else they helped (the last coordinates had to be different for others)? Was it necessary for Cage’s son to be hearing impaired? The other little girl could hear the whispering just fine and there was nothing wrong with her. Why did the alien angels hide their true selves inside creepy albino men, if all they wanted to do was rescue children? They clearly weren’t very good at this because they even revealed a horrifying vision to Cage’s kid of burning animals running through the forest. This probably was not the best way to convince children to come with them. I think if they had just shown them their spaceship, the kids would have immediately gone with them. What kid doesn’t want to ride in a spaceship?

I had more questions, but they’ve faded too much now. I’m pretty sure I won’t have this dream again, but I wouldn’t put it past my brain to give me a dream sequel sometime in the future. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just realized I still have some drool on my chin after experiencing this dream.

Rating: If this was in fact a film, ask for nine of your ten dollars back. That way, you can buy some peanut butter to eat just before you go to sleep, giving you a good chance of having a dream better than this movie.