Richard Linklater's new movie Waking Life is as unique an experience as we'll find in the theaters this year. Untraditional both in form (a live-action/animation hybrid) and content (a series of mostly unconnected philosophical conversations), the film can't be labeled with typical genre terms, so reviewers have resorted to metaphors: It's a philosophy survey course; it's an anthology of existentialism; it's four years' worth of late night university dorm room conversations.

But while Waking Life spouts philosophy from beginning to end, it is not just a philosophical survey. It's a cinematic prayer book. Each scene gives rise to a rehearsed philosophical concept, but the presentation is more like a liturgy than a syllabus -- it doesn't explain, it contemplates. Waking Life is meditative, dreamy, incandescent. It doesn't teach philosophical ideas so much as it whispers the language of those ideas, lighting candles and praying that the concepts will shed some effectual light. It is, to borrow religion scholar Ninian Smart's description of all contemporary art, "not philosophy as reason, but philosophy as feeling." In other words, a quasi-religious exercise.

At center of the film is an unnamed character (played by Willy Wiggins) who, while not quite an Everyman, is at least a type of person we've all either known or been -- the disaffected twenty-something with little sense of purpose or place but with a driving curiosity about life (complete with long hair and droopy clothes). Wiggins played the lead role in Linklater's Dazed and Confused, and this character is both a reprisal of that role and a nod toward Linklater's first film, Slacker. As in Slacker, Waking Life follows its lead character through an episodic series of conversations and rants among coffeehouse philosophers. The movie is made up entirely of Wiggins' dreams, but we keep thinking that he's woken up only to realize that he's still in the middle of a strangely intense and lasting reverie. His dreams are lucid, lifelike, and always of a philosophical nature -- he's either discussing a weighty idea with someone, listening in on people's deep conversations, or (most often) listening to one person monologue about a range of philosophical notions, from free will vs. determinism to linguistic theory to reincarnation to the problem of objectivity.

In an early scene, Wiggins hitches a ride with a man in a boat-like car who proclaims the abstract purpose of riding around in a boat-like car: "The idea is to remain in a constant state of departure while always arriving." Later, he talks to a theoretical scientist who delivers a hyperactive rant about the "will to nothingness." At times this sort of sloganeering seems like a mere rehearsal of ideas, as if every existentialist theory you've ever heard is going to be recounted, or updated in terms of recent ideas about quantum physics and technology. But there's nothing behind the rehearsal. The dreams are unconnected and mysterious, offering partial glimpses of meaning but no definite answers. As one character says, "There's no story. It's just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture. In short, the greatest story ever told."

These are not dreams as direct revelation -- there is no prophetic vision, no booming, reliable voice. Rather, these are dreams as icons, windows to the divine; dreams as priests, pointing toward potentially reliable truth. The experience for the dreamer (as for the worshipper) is potent, if not complete. Wiggins can get into the temple, but he can't quite enter the holy of holies. The dreams are ritual -- ongoing, necessary, practiced, and, for Wiggins, ultimately lacking. Each dream leaves him intrigued and sometimes even encouraged, but not satisfied.

Thirty years ago in his book Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ) argued that movies could affect a spiritual form. Waking Life plays like a realization of Schrader's ideas. Shot on video and then animated with a film tracing process called Rotoscoping, Waking Life has a jarring, otherworldly look. Everything shakes -- the outlines of figures pulse in and out constantly. Sometimes, when characters speak, mini-illustrations of their ideas form next to their heads; at other times, their heads themselves form into the ideas. The entire movie feels like it's bubbling just above the surface of the rational world. Waking Life is about dreams, and it looks and feels like a dream.

Near the movie's end, the Wiggins character wanders into a bar for one final conversation with a nameless priest, this one voiced by Linklater himself (if the writer/director is the Guiding Force behind the movie, then this is his Incarnation). Linklater tells Wiggins about a dream the science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick once had where he learned that Jesus Christ is alive and available right now, but not for the reasons Christians usually tell us about. Jesus is alive because we are living in the Book of Acts, the biblical account of the days following the first Easter. Jesus is alive because there is no history; there is no Christ to search for in the past. There is only one moment, and that moment is now.

The key metaphor for dreaming in Waking Life is floating. At the beginning of the movie, when Wiggins first realizes he is dreaming, he has to hold onto the handle of a car door to keep from flying into the atmosphere. The movie is about him trying to come down, to plant both feet on the ground and stop dreaming. He walks (or floats) from conversation to conversation, from idea to idea, hoping to find the one ultimate answer that will bring his wayfaring days to an end. But his journey teaches him only one thing: Stay on the journey. You're just a pilgrim, so let yourself float. Let go of the door handle and fly into the atmosphere.

For the Wiggins character, being awake is an act of faith. He believes that he can wake up, that he will wake up, that he is awake. Over and over again, he finds an advisor, gains new possible insights into the meaning of existence, and tries to wake up. He is the man of constant sorrow, hoping home is just around the bend. He ultimately can't wake up, or hasn't yet, but he stays on the journey.

Linklater says that he's an avid reader of religious philosophy, but that he can't quite choose one religion among the options. We ask, philosophical ideas answer, we thank them for their kind help and move on. In our waking lives as in dreams, his latest movie proposes, it's the moving on that matters, even if it's just moving on to the next dream.