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It's a pleasant experience and you are intrigued about what is going to happen next. Then it darkens and becomes more like a nightmare - you are uncomfortable and troubled.
Finally, tossing and turning, you are desperate for it to be over. Released from its grip, you return to consciousness wondering what it all meant.
(The only difference between Vanilla Sky and a real nightmare is that the nightmare doesn't cost you $20 - $22 if you have extra butter in the middle of your barrel of popcorn.)
Adapted by writer-director Cameron Crowe from Spaniard Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 film Open Your Eyes, Vanilla Sky demonstrates not only Crowe's huge skills but his poor judgment in selecting material. For the writer-director of such honest, funny character studies as Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, getting a handle on Vanilla Sky's blend of psychological thriller, fantasy and New Age musings seems beyond his grasp.
Then again, maybe nobody, not even the talented Crowe, could have made any sense out of Vanilla Sky, available on video and DVD this week.
The film reunites Crowe with his Jerry Maguire star, Tom Cruise, at his charismatic, glib best as wealthy playboy David Aames.
"Livin' the dream,'' is how Aames describes his perfect, master-of-the-universe life, establishing a theme that runs throughout the movie - and will haunt us like the aforementioned nightmare.
Clever, interesting dialogue and a tasty soundtrack - Crowe has a superb ear for music - establish Aames's charmed existence, answering to no one, doling out that killer smile and boyish charm to break down the defences of everyone he comes in contact with and leaving broken hearts strewn about his spectacular Manhattan apartment.
One of those hearts belongs to Cameron Diaz, the best thing in the movie, playing Aames's sometime girlfriend, Julie. She's in love with the cad but goes along with the charade that they are just friends.
When another woman - played by Penelope Cruz, who had the same role in the Spanish original - enters the picture and immediately captivates Aames, Julie can't play along anymore.
This is where the trouble begins for the golden boy.
There is a car accident that leaves Aames, who now covers his disfigured face with a latex mask, and an earnest psychologist (Kurt Russell) trying to sort out a grisly crime.
It would be unfair to reveal any more about Vanilla Sky. It would also be impossible.
"What the f--- is happening?" says Aames, as events - and the movie - spin out of control.
It's a good question, and one you will be answering as Vanilla Sky becomes hopelessly confusing and unworthy of the effort required to sort it all out.
We are never sure what is real and Crowe is determined to keep us stranded in this dreamscape as it darkens into the kind of nightmare from which you wake up in a cold sweat. Trouble is, you are trapped until the credits roll.
Slick and stylish and with a nice tension for its first hour, Vanilla Sky squanders any respect you may have for it when it turns into a preposterous exercise in New Age platitudes - "What is any life but the pursuit of a dream."
It tests your patience before an incomprehensible cop-out of an ending will leave you giggling - or furious.
Perhaps at one point, Vanilla Sky - the title refers to the colours in an impressionist painting - aspired to be a cinematic essay on the nature of existence. Instead, it's a lightweight cautionary tale that warns us that there are consequences to our bad behaviour. Sort of a lesson in "do unto others ...''
In all of the threads of story and the varying styles, there is an interesting psychological thriller at work here.
If Crowe had set his sights on that thriller, and employed his superlative skills as a writer to round out the characters and resolve the story in a plausible way, Vanilla Sky might have been like a dream - a state of cinematic bliss.
Here's hoping you are not haunted by this movie nightmare.
VANILLA SKY - original rating: 31/2 SUNS (out of 5); DVD/video rating: 2 SUNS