Did this ever happen? Where is the line between reality and illusion, existence and consciousness? The director may be reminding us to ask ourselves, "Is the world we live in real? How do we verify its reality? What does it mean to be real? What is sanity? What is madness? To what extent does beauty and ugliness affect us?"
Another question posed by the movie is "Are the desires and horrors of our hearts affecting our perception of reality, making us unable to distinguish between reality and dreams?"
The beginning and the end of the movie reminds us that we can't tell the difference between reality and dreams. are reminders to open your eyes from the unreal.
The end of the movie offers no fixed explanation; there are countless possibilities.
The movie begins with a nightmare and ends with a complete awakening, and there is a dream within a dream, a nightmare in a beautiful dream, a dream within a dream, and the scene of the dream's release becomes the material for another dream's release. It's all like a nesting doll, with layers within layers and a nest within a nest.
An obvious structural element of the dream is a low female voice calling out, "Open your eyes," which appears twice in the opening credits, once in the film's most important dramatic turn, and then in the epilogue, where it becomes the film's first and last lines. The first time it appears, David is woken up in a nightmare. He wakes up with these words, gets up and drives out of the car as usual, but in the city of light and shadow, with huge billboards everywhere, there is not a single sign of people, all the streets are empty, and David, in a state of infinite panic, abandons the car, runs wildly through the streets of the famous Times Square, and cries out in despair. In this may be the world's busiest New York 42nd Avenue and Times Square, the crew blocked its up to two hours for live shooting, spend money, and the effect of this live shooting is really shocking, in such an originally overcrowded place alone with all the old modern civilization, how to run wild and hissing can not give vent to the inner fear.
A second call came at this point. This call brought David out of the nightmare and into real life, but in fact it was the beginning of a tragic nightmare of life. When he wakes up there is a blonde lying next to him, and when David does not invite her to his birthday party and falls in love with another brunette she martyred David and took him into the nightmare forever, and a voice appears in this scene that will appear later on in the psychoanalyst's interpretation of the dream, which is the interpretation of the dream.
The third call appeared in a sunny morning, after David was forced to martyr himself and caused disfigurement and disability, abandoned drunken street sewage side of the left side of David put his damn similar to the mask of the faceless man, at this time, a gentle and charming voice calling, this is David's true love, the brunette Spanish beauty Penelope. The return of Sophia, played by Cruz, is true love's rescue of a man who has lost the world, yet later we learn that this is a dream, a daydream, a perfect dream created by high technology, but at the very beginning of this beautiful dream lurks the deepest element of nightmare. This dream is chosen by David himself, it is perfect, it is perfectly suited to his love, but while he and she are making love, Sophia underneath him suddenly turns into Julie, and this time Julie's return is the highest point of panic in the whole movie, David sees Julie, and he goes crazy searching for Sophia until he blindsides Julie/Sophia, and sees a mole underneath the dead man's breasts, which is Sophia's symbol, and he sees a mole underneath the dead woman's breasts, which is Sophia's symbol, and it is a nightmare. So far this beautiful dream was ended in a nightmare way.
Till the end of the movie, when David chooses between his perfect dream and his real life, the call comes again, and after David chooses his real life, he jumps off the building that seems to be 10,000 feet high in his dream, and his whole life passes in front of his eyes. Yet in this moment of perfection there is still no way to determine whether this is a dream or reality, and it is not until the end credits begin to roll and roll that we realize that it is all over, and that reality, in all its brutality, has finally won and returned.