Who Is The Dreamer? ‘Twin Peaks’ Bends Time And Reality To Its Will In “Part 14”

David Lynch’s art over the last 25 years has paid particular attention to a Möbius strip progression of time; His art since the very beginning has been obsessed with the nature of dreams and their porous relationship to reality. The original Twin Peaks made dreams a narrative engine. “Part 14” of Twin Peaks: The Return pushes both of these concepts to the forefront. Lynch makes dreams and their significance the center of the episode, thanks to two stories by Gordon Cole (Lynch) and Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle), and a moment with Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) inside one of the Lodge spaces.
In the first, Cole tells Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) about his phone call with Frank Truman (Robert Forster), which corroborates their belief that Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) may not be all that he seems. This triggers a dream Cole had the night before, where Monica Bellucci tells him that “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?”

This triggers a memory of Cole when Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) returned to our plane of reality in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. In this memory, of course, Cooper warns Cole about a dream he himself had. Jeffries asks Cole who he thinks Cooper is. Cole is the dreamer living inside the dream; but is he the dreamer?
It’s interesting to see how Cole’s dream would involve this memory, and that Cole would recall it after Truman relayed this information. Cooper—and Cole by extension—used dreams to guide their investigations of Blue Rose cases. Cooper’s dreams of ancient Tibetan investigative methods, and one where he found himself in the Red Room with Laura Palmer 25 years after her murder, helped him identify BOB, and eventually Leland Palmer, as Laura’s killer. So too Cole is using his dream to bolster his investigation of Cooper’s doppelgänger and Major Garland Briggs.

Cooper’s identity has been splintered, as he wanders Las Vegas in a semi-catatonic state, everyone believing he is Dougie Jones, while his Black Lodge doppelgänger has wreaked havoc on two continents over the last 25 years. The dream-memory, of hearing Jeffries exclaim, “Who do you think that is there???” makes Cole understand that the Cooper he saw in Yankton federal prison is not the same Cooper he once knew.
Andy Brennan’s experience in the black-and-white room of the Fireman (Carel Struycken)—formerly known as The Giant—ostensibly takes place in “reality,” but like so many sequences in the Black Lodge and other extradimensional spaces in the series, feels like a dream, and can only be explained as such after the fact. That’s how Truman and Hawk (Michael Horse) feel about what they might have seen 253 yards east of Jack Rabbit’s Palace.

Andy, on the other hand, is possessed of a remarkable clarity about his moment with the Fireman. He sits in the same chair Cooper sat in all the way back in the very first new scene in “Part 1.” A small log cabin appears in his hands, while smoke gathers in reverse, back into its chimney. A port hole appears above Andy’s head, and then plays back events previously seen in “Part 1,” “Part 6,” and “Part 8,” while also looping back on things that had just happened when the team discovered Naido (Nae Yuuki) lying on the forest ground. We also see a traveling shot of telephone wires, a shot from the pilot of the original series, the classic photo of Laura Palmer—this time flanked by the angel from Fire Walk with Me—and a shot of Andy and Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) that has yet to happen.
All of these details give Andy a broader perspective about the mysteries in which the entire town of Twin Peaks is embroiled. He doesn’t spell that perspective out, but it clearly points him in the direction of what must happen next, beyond just placing Naido in a safe space and keeping her existence a secret. The dream space that he inhabited for those few minutes illuminated rather than obfuscated.
Freddie Sykes similarly has a direct encounter with the Fireman, but in telling the story, it can’t help but sound like a dream. In fact, Sykes may have had the most plain-faced conversation that any character has ever had with the Fireman/Giant! Normally, the Fireman speaks in riddles and code. Sykes, by contrast, is told expressly what he must do, and what it will bring him. Buy and wear that single green gardening glove, and you will gain super-strength in your right hand. Move to Twin Peaks, and you will find your destiny. That’s a whole lot clearer than “The owls are not what they seem,” or “4-3-0.”

Despite the clarity of Sykes’s experience, his recounting of it still obeys the ways in which we remember dreams. The details are a bit sharper, but Lynch and Frost’s approach to the content itself reminds us of how Cole spoke at the episode’s beginning, as well as the ways in which Cooper would discuss dreams in the original series. It’s not just the dream itself that is important; it’s also in the telling of the dream that helps to shape its meaning.
“Part 13” began to break time apart in such ways that by the series’ end, we may not be entirely certain when—or if—certain events occurred. “Part 14” made sure that reality and dreams began to fold in on each other, with only the stories of those dreams tethering them to our reality. Dreams are sometimes more real than the Real. The future may be the past. For David Lynch, there really isn’t much of a difference.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime