This personal film is told with a keen intelligence, even in the midst of Hardie’s darkest times of despair. By investigating the one thing that most of us are deeply afraid of, this filmmaker has created an ode to all of our senses, not just those limited to our waking perceptions. The Edge of Dreaming provides no facile or conclusive answers at all, instead illustrating what is most mysterious and magical about the undying love we have for life.

The overall production is artfully enhanced by Gunnar Óskarsson’s superb sound design, Jim Sutherland’s subtle and moving musical composition, graceful editing by Ling Lee, and breathtaking cinematography by Hardie.

Click here to read the full review.

I’m still alive. The shamanic journey had such a powerful impact on me I expected the hospital to tell me my lungs were cured  immediately. It didn’t happen like that. My tests showed my lungs remained at 60% function for around six months after the shamanic journey. But gradually, they improved. I could walk up stairs, even run. I felt better and better. In March this year, they tested and discovered my lungs are up to 94%.

The hospital consultants don’t understand it. ‘Spontaneous remission’. The links between our brain and our body are manifold. My next film will explore how some doctors can get particularly good results by analyzing, and learning how to work with these electrochemical brain/body connections. Case study by case study, they are building up a solid body of evidence.

It is now two years since that first shamanic journey. Did I journey to the lands of the dead? With the help of Claudia Goncalves I have returned several times now to the shamanic trance state, allowing me access to parts of my brain I do not normally make use of. I have also begun to work with Sandra Ingerman, the marine biologist who discovered she could make more effective changes to polluted water by working with energy. She has photographed the structural changes in the water molecules.

I both look forward and backwards now the film is completed. Backwards to the 17th century Iroquois Americans described by a Jesuit priest who despaired that they began every day discussing their dreams, instead of planning how to get ahead. When they had a fearful dream, they would ask people in the community to enact it with them, keeping the energy flow of the dream, but substituting a less severe outcome. For instance, if they dreamt their legs were broken after an attack, their friends would simulate the attack but only bruise their legs. Was I doing a similar thing with this film? Going through the experience of facing my own imminent death, and sharing it with the community by making a film about it?

There is a lot of space for the audience in the film. My aim was to be as accurate as possible to the events of that year, so that even if I did not understand an image or an event, the audience could bring their own experience and perception and interpret it themselves. Some things only made sense to me later. I have discovered more of the symbolism of the snake, for instance. I have looked further into Jung’s notion of ‘adumbratio’, the shadow that impending death casts over the psyche. I am coming to a clearer understanding of our connection with each other, and the earth. I actively engage with the ways in which the earth, animals and other people act on us without a spoken language.

I go forward from the film by working with audiences after screenings. I offer a space for the audience to tell their own stories, and a way of engaging with the fears in those stories. I am just back from the North of Scotland, where the film set a new record for a cinema audience. The Universal hall was packed, and the next day we held a  workshop. Kathy White, one of the participants, describes the event:

My experience of watching this film was profound. There was a depth created through the simple story - perhaps through the range of the film, from the everydayness of life with kids, to the scientific explanations of dreams, to the mystery beyond dreams, life itself. Because of the spaciousness in the film, the poetry in the images, I found myself more and more drawn into the film. There was space for me.

In an odd way I was perhaps even more aware than usual that I was watching a screen.  The screen was playing out something about me.   I was drawn into a participatory role, actively witnessing and engaging with themes and issues that are both universal and deeply mine.

What Amy then offered felt profoundly new. Not only did she make a film that many people found transformative, but by having a talk and 2hr workshop the next day, I was able to ground my engagement. I had a very profound experience in the workshop. Two days on, I am still in the midst of transformation. Some of the answers I and others in the audience found and expressed in an open forum made this experience a completely different paradigm of cinema. 

Cinema is a young artform. Storytelling, on the other hand, is many thousands of years old. And perhaps even older are the prehistoric cave paintings deep in the limestone caves of France - evidence of artists creating and lighting images to bring us into contact with the real and the imagined. I stand in this tradition, aware of the thousands of generations before us, who used flame and pigment, who spun magic with words. I want to take cinema to a place both profoundly intimate and held in community, a place as old as the presentation of a mammoth gleaming on a rockwall, and as new as the digital pulse.

Hardie’s wonderful camerawork and the editing of Ling Lee which stitches together the moments with her family when she is trying to come to terms with the effect of the possibility of her dying on her and them and also some beautiful animation of Cameron Duguid. This film could easily have become self indulgent but because of the strength of Hardie’s work and engagement with her own family and her ideas and because of her own self and her courage in confronting ideas that she does not like, we are always taken with her. It is rare to see a film that embraces and takes on complex science and philosophical notions of the world and does it so accessibly and so warmly. I would heartily recommend this film.

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The true account of the year following the dream prophesy, the film is, on a manifest level, a lyrical celebration of the precious moments of the filmmaker's life, offering poetic images of Ms. Hardie and family in a gorgeous Scottish countrysides: scenes at sunset swinging on the hammock with an adorably concerned daughter, shots of the director snuggling with her psychologist husband in an airy bedroom, dark birds moving in formation in the clouds. "I wanted my eyes to feast on what I love," the director comments.

But what makes Edge of Dreaming a film that sticks with you is the sober panic ("I had a pit in my stomach") -- and the question that persists: can dreams tell the future? "We think we know a lot with our rational brain, but perhaps we know a lot more in our irrational brain." So Ms. Hardie, already acclaimed as a science documentarian (working with stem cell researchers) contacted the foremost scientists working on the brain today, to discover how dreams 'really' work.

Read the full article here.

'A profound piece of work that is earthy and redemptive at the same time as being reflective, questioning and diligent... a poetic masterpiece.'

Tear up the rules of Documentary. With The Edge of Dreaming they no longer apply. Yes, there’s an investigation – into the nature and meaning of dreams. And yes, there’s objectivity galore, with the views and insights of some of the world’s most eminent neurologists and psychologists. But along with an outer probing into the latest scientific research this is a very personal journey into the neural pathways of the brain, the darkest hours of the night and the indelible fibres of past relationships.

Amy Hardie has three dreams: three deeply disturbing dreams. In the first she dreams her horse dies and she goes out into the early dawn to discover him dead. In the second she hears the voice of her deceased former partner, the father to her son: the voice says she will not make it past 48. Then she turns 48. In the third she dreams of how she’ll die.

Are these omens? Or simple anxieties? Whichever, they shake her seemingly perfect life as a life science documentary maker living in a rural idyll with a lovely, phlegmatic husband (a psychoanalyst) and happy children. She lets us glimpse this life and the life that lead up to this – childhood and former relationship - through fly-on-the-wall footage, old home movies and stills montages. At the same time she leads us into inner worlds, the landscapes of the mind and brain, through a skilful interweaving of illustrations, animated diagrams, tonal superimposition and startling, beautiful imagery. She has a truly gifted editor in Ling Lee who layers this story through seamless cutting and overlays so it feels more like being in the labyrinth of a Marquez or Calvino novel than a documentary. By the end you feel like you’re in a dream yourself and that Amy’s quest is universal: to understand the vast non-rational dimension within, that ‘civilised’ societies pretend is of no consequence.

It’s this intricate storytelling, with its own unhurried rhythm shadowing the ancient hills and gulleys of her Borders homeland, that makes this something other than what one usually expects from documentary. This is not slick film making. It’s too personal for that. But it’s beautiful and deeply considered. It’s something we get rarely – more in the poetic masterpieces of a Louis Malle or an Ang Lee. What’s ultimately so surprising about this film is that it’s made by an attractive middle class white professional woman (and mother, daughter, sister, wife) yet is so distinctly ill-fitting into any stereotype or presumption that that definition arouses. When she films herself gaunt and breathless in hospital with a suspected collapsed lung, we feel her weariness and admire her steely strength; and when she crosses the accepted boundaries of our cultural upbringing and puts herself in the hands of a shaman we feel - not just witness - her fear and bravery along with the primitive and awesome power of the spirit world guarded by the spectres of her own terror.

This is a film of an extraordinary journey. It’s deeply moving –when the lights come up you feel you’ve been a long way (on both the superhighways and dusty roads of knowledge). It’s a profound piece of work that is earthy and redemptive at the same time as being reflective, questioning and diligent, so that the overall effect is emotionally destabilising and intellectually challenging. A poetic masterpiece.

There you go, a real camera stylo personal essay film with an original, personal style. I was completely taken in by the beauty of the film, "The Edge of Dreaming", of Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie. It touched me, made me reflect on my own life, my family life, my growing up, at the same time as the intensity of storytelling makes you stay in an atmosphere of listening and watching and reflecting. For me this is what a good documentary can be with many layers, a mature commentary, about Life and Death, and told in numerous stylistical lines. You can’t help fall in love with the family of Amy Hardie. They live in (Scottish) nature surroundings that a camera can only adore. And you can’t help admire the manner Hardie, using rough home video material, goes visually elegantly back in time and forward again. We get her story about her first husband, who died years ago, but who comes back to her in a dream to ”announce” that she will die when she is 48 years of age. There are dream sequences, and there are stunning images that make me think of classic Dutch paintings. It is all mixed brilliantly and without any predictability.

I better stop my praise and give you the prose of the producers from the idfa catalogue: This is the story of a rational, sceptical woman, a mother and wife, who does not remember her dreams. Except once, when she dreamt her horse was dying. She woke so scared she went outside in the night. She found him dead. The next dream told her she would die herself, when she was 48. The film explores life, dreams and death in the context of a warm, loving family whose happiness is increasingly threatened as the dream seems to be proving true. The final confrontation, returning inside the dream with a shaman, reveals a surprising twist to the tale.

Tue Steen Muller, international writer on documentary and director of European Documentary Network from 1996 – 2005, gave the film his top rating – five pen nibs.

This woman seems to have it all - the handsome husband, beautiful children, the picturesque house in the Scottish countryside. As a sceptic and a hedonist, when she dreams of her horse's death, and wakes up to discover him dead, she tries to ignore it. But when she dreams of her own death, within the year, she begins to explore every avenue to avoid this dream becoming to fruition.

"I'm a mum with three kids, overstretched, loving it. The kids are integrated into this story - it's wound through taking them to school, checking heads for lice, cuddles in bed and tantrums in the kitchen. The animals and the landscape also play a big part. I live up in the Scottish mountains, with huge views and no neighbours. We get lots of stars.

I was very shocked by my dreams. I make science films for a living and I don't normally remember my dreams, unlike my psychoanalyst husband. He writes his dreams every morning, and says, comfortingly, that they are not to be taken literally. Except that my dream of my horse's death was literally true. And this was followed my two more dreams, warning me that I would die this year, and then showing me how I would die.

I began filming my children after my lungs collapsed. I wanted to get the whole year in record. I didn't tell my two girls, because I didn't want them scared. Nevertheless my youngest daughter came home and read my palm, announcing cheerily that my life line was short and that I would "have a happy life, but a short one" .

I met with neuroscientist Mark Solms, who has come to pre-eminence for his original scientific research into the sleeping brain states. He took me through what happens in the dreaming brain, and what he thought could be happening to me.

I realised, with only a month to go, I was really in danger - and that I had to get back inside my dream in order to change the dream."