Michel Gondry, director of the film "Science of Sleep." (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
And really, who wouldn't want to be linked to Gael Garcia Bernal by a cable attached to his bicycle helmet? (AP Photo/HO/Etienne George, Warner Indendent Pictures)
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Michel Gondry has made a career of swirling dreams with reality.

His commercials, documentaries and movies are grounded, if you can call it that, in whimsical visuals and abstract links, inspired both by his own relationships and by visions that come in his sleep.

The 43-year-old French filmmaker's new movie "The Science of Sleep," opening Friday and starring Gael Garcia Bernal, is all about blurring that line between dream life and real life.

In person, one can see Gondry's attentions fleeting between what's in front of his eyes and whatever is churning in his head at the moment.

asap asked the director of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the upcoming "Be Kind Rewind" about his own dreams: How he remembers them, what they're about and what's up with that one that keeps coming back.

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CONNECTING DREAMS WITH REALITY

Gondry records his dreams in notebooks or on scratches of paper, making links between images he remembers in one column and what's going on in his real life in another. As he's writing the visuals down, he skips lines so he can fill them in with more details that he'll remember later on. "I put them together and I find the connection that I'm missing in the dream," he said. His films are filled with those disconnected, abstract images, which often force viewers to make their own connections. He concludes "Sleep," for example, with a romantic image that unaplogetically leaves reality behind. In the end, the dream takes over.

THE DREAM DIRECTOR

Yet Gondry controls his dreams. He says he acts as his own dream director, even changing the bass and treble on imaginary stereos while he's sleeping. Ever the film fiend, he remembers critiquing dreamed images as being too grainy to have come from a 35 mm film stock: "They were more like 16 millimeter."

And so, his style emerges. Dreaminess is achieved in Gondry films and ads not through special effects but primarily through old-fashioned techniques: stop-motion animation, camera movements, editing trickery. Similarly, he doesn't let his dreams get too far afield in flights of fancy. "There's a part of your brain that goes to sleep when you dream, that's supposed to tell you whether it's logical or not logical. If it makes no sense at all and you realize it's completely bullshit, then you wake up."

THE ONE DREAM HE CAN'T SHAKE

Gondry is a deeply personal, self-aware filmmaker. His pain, his insecurities about relationships emerge through characters like Bernal's in "Sleep" or Jim Carrey's in "Sunshine." And so, the one dream that comes back to him more than any other is not abstract, but grounded in his family. He imagines himself buying his childhood home in Versailles and calling his brother to say they'll move back there with his mother.

Even after making a short film about the dream, it kept coming back. Each time, he believed it was true, that it actually was happening after all those years of dreaming it. And each time, it was still a dream.

"Obviously I want to be back in this place where we're all one family. I don't need to analyze it more. ... It's deep enough. The feeling to be back, the nostalgia of being a child in a very warm family," he said.

So why doesn't he do it? Buy the home, be with his family?

"It would be very sad to do that in reality," he said.

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asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson can never remember his dreams.

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