The sixth episode of Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams is centered around the lives of Ali, his wife Ningsih, and their children Ayu and Hendra. Ali is color blind, and hence, he has difficulty getting jobs. Ningsih is worried that they won’t be able to pay Ayu and Hendra’s school fees. Ali’s neighbor, Iwan, is aware of his issues, but his solution is to steal money from people by hypnotizing them. Iwan even teaches Ali how to get the job done, but Ali is wary of such illegal activities. So, he ignores Iwan’s suggestion. But when things get dire, he stalks and hypnotizes an elderly woman at an ATM booth and orders her to give some of her money to him. Things seemingly get better as Ali’s color blindness goes away; Ningsih is able to pay off Ayu and Hendra’s school fees and buy whatever she wants. However, Ayu, Hendra, and Ningsih’s behavior deteriorates rapidly, which causes Ali to wonder if stealing, albeit out of desperation, was a good thing.
Spoiler Alert
Was Ali the one who was hypnotized?
About midway through episode 6 of Nightmares and Daydreams, Ali notices that something weird is going on. All the television sets that he is supposed to fix are playing a spiraling hypnotic video on a loop, even though those sets are unplugged. His family is sitting in front of the TV set in their house and laughing maniacally, but they are not responding to him. To make matters worse, he gets a phone call from his deceased father-in-law, who reminds Ali that it’s okay to do whatever one needs to do to survive as long as nobody gets hurt. That’s the moment when it becomes clear that Ali has been in a state of hypnosis all this time. To make this fact a little more explicit, the woman who Ali hypnotized in the ATM stall shows up on one of Ali’s TV sets. She even teleports Ali’s consciousness onto the hands of a huge clock atop a massive tower, thereby paying homage to Buster Keaton’s iconic scene from Safety Last! Ali tries to bargain with the lady and asks for her forgiveness. Momentarily, it seems like Ali has exited his state of hypnosis and things have gone back to normal. But Ali’s sense of relief turns into dread as he realizes that he is still in Dewi’s control, thereby proving that it’s easy to commit a sin out of greed, but it’s not that easy to rid yourself of the guilt of committing such a sinful task. Desperation can force people to do bad things, and it’s easy for privileged people to say that one shouldn’t steal even if they have gone broke. However, this tussle between Ali and Dewi shows that one should let their desperation dictate their actions only if they can tackle the weight of the guilt that comes with it.
Why did Dewi hypnotize Ali?
Dewi tells Ali that he is being punished for stealing her money. Ali tries to make it seem that he has done what he has done for his children, but Dewi says that Ali is a selfish man, and he tried to hypnotize her because he thought he could get away with it. Dewi says that Ali is going to die when the hands of the aforementioned clock become fully vertical. That said, she gives him an out by letting him know that he can escape his fate if he is able to gain control of his mind. Ali obviously doesn’t understand what that means. So, he searches for the clock tower and tries to get there. But he finds himself locked in his own house. When he does manage to exit the house, he steps into a void. He miraculously reaches the clock tower and tries to climb it, but he fails. Moments later, he is teleported to the hands of the clock. At the end of Nightmares and Daydreams episode 6, Ali is about to fall to his death, and that’s when he gains control of his mind and breaks out of Dewi’s hypnosis. Apparently, this whole test was happening while Ali was dangling from the edge of a pulley system that’s atop a building. Dewi says that she has been looking for special people like Ali and wanted to see if he has the ability to not just control his own mind but that of others as well. She says that she is assembling a team to save all of humanity from some unknown threat. At the moment, it’s unclear who or what this threat is that Dewi is talking about, but if I take an educated guess, then I guess she is referring to the monster she encountered in episode 5, which is titled The Other Side.
How Is ‘Hypnotized’ Connected to ‘The Other Side’ and ‘Poems and Pain’?
Episode 5 of Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams was centered around Dewi, her husband Bandi, and their child Marhan. Bandi used to work at a movie theater that was shut down a long time ago. Bandi made hand-painted movie posters, and the owner of a building allowed him to work from there and stay there with his family. Dewi could’ve inherited a ton of money, but due to the prickly relationship with her family, she chose to stay away from them and support Bandi and Marhan the best she could. However, Bandi kept gravitating towards that theater, and every time he went there, he disappeared for several years. When Dewi realized that Bandi was being manipulated by a demon all this time and he had been taken to the woods for a ritual, she rushed to rescue him. The demon tried to subdue Dewi and turn her into a member of its horde, but Dewi’s love for Bandi unlocked her powers of telepathy. She managed to distract the demon and plunge a staff into its stomach. This did banish the demon, but Dewi was unable to bring Bandi back to normalcy. All that happened in 1997, and Ali’s whole episode happens in 2022. So, Dewi clearly had a lot of time to enhance her powers and find out the source of the demons (like the one that took Bandi away from him) that were taking over Earth. Maybe that’s when she came across other telepathic people like herself, thereby prompting her to form a team that can keep the world safe. In addition to that, Ali’s son’s name is Hendra, and the name of Raina’s friend from episode 3 is Hendra as well. Maybe Hendra is a common Indonesian name, or this is the show’s way of hinting at the interconnected nature of the seemingly self-contained episodes.
