A young boy wanders out into his driveway, and begins to lift off the ground. He instinctively grabs the door handle of a car, and remains earthbound, unwilling to float into the unknown dreamworld.

This scene opens Richard Linklater’s astonishing “Waking Life” and it embodies viewers’ first response to the film. The film’s innovative animation, in which real actors were painted over with computers, is beautiful and hypnotically surreal but is somewhat off-putting at first. Most filmmakers would incorporate the strange world of this film as a dream sequence sandwiched in a familiar, live-action narrative.

Not so with Linklater. He has produced an expanding vibrant dream of a movie, and there is nothing to keep its viewers from floating away.

Initial unease soon gives way to a sense of giddy exhilaration. You quickly understand that in the dreamy landscape of “Waking Life,” anything is possible. The film follows the boy from the opening, now college-aged and played by Wiley Wiggins, as he embarks on an aimless journey through an unnamed city, where he encounters scores of characters, all of whom have their own unique takes on identity and life.

He floats into the lives of prisoners, political activists, lovers, professors, film theorists, musicians, artists, slackers, Steven Soderbergh and many other people who escape simple definition. Many of these people, such as the professors, are real acquaintances of Linklater who speak their own thoughts.

The protagonist rarely interacts with these people. Rather, he listens to their ideas as a passive agent and then moves on, just like the audience. The film’s collage of personalities and ideas boils down to the idea that creating your own meaning for life, no matter in what form, is essential to being alive.

It’s probably clear by now that “Waking Life” does not have much of a plot. Characters float in and out of the story, and the protagonist serves primarily as our guide through the landscape of the dreamworld, never becoming a fully-developed character. Eventually, he realizes he has been dreaming his encounters and tries to find a way back to the assurance of the real world — in one sense, still clinging to that door handle.

Viewers are compelled by the questions of his frustrating quandary. Why can’t he wake from his dream? Is he dead? Is he more alive in a dream than in reality? These questions are wisely left in the air. Linklater’s film is concerned with the condition of being alive apart from the restrictions and trappings of reality.

In this environment, we are free to see the power of the theories we create to comfort and sustain us through the uncertainty of life.

Linklater, known best for “Slacker,” “Dazed and Confused,” “SubUrbia” and “Before Sunrise,” has dealt before with young people thinking about and questioning their lives, but never as profoundly as in “Waking Life.”

In all Linklater films, the characters talk at length. Here, he brilliantly exaggerates and underscores their discussions with Bob Sabiston’s breathtaking computer animation. Using Macintosh G4 computers, Sabiston and his small animation crew created a transcendent cinematic universe.

Characters’ facial features and their backgrounds are surreally distorted or subtly amplified to enhance the profundity of their arguments and to illuminate their personalities. The pulsating, twisting and untwisting red strands of a woman’s hair channels her unique vibrancy and verve. The expanding and retracting spectacles of a pontificating philosopher reveal his ideal vision of a future that is larger-than-life in its meaning. Backgrounds can stun with rich color or seethe with violent movement, showing that existence is both unspeakably beautiful and disquietingly tenuous. Ideas and emotions are able to become organic characters, taking shape and evolving with the freedom of the film’s visual imagination.

Once you’ve seen “Waking Life,” the film takes on the qualities of a dream. You don’t clearly recall everything that happened, and it’s difficult to put the film’s events back in sequential order. Some characters and ideas stand out in your mind above others, some fade away as time goes on.

Long after you have viewed Linklater’s mind-altering achievement, distilled images and ideas will continue to haunt your imagination. For me, one of these images is an elderly painter standing at her canvas, a testament to our need to create in order to live, warmly smiling at the film’s lost protagonist as he wanders by. For others, this scene might be completely forgotten. The magic of “Waking Life” lies in its ability to connect with each viewer in a unique way and still speak to everyone as an unforgettable, thought-provoking portrait of human existence. nyou

“Waking Life” opens locally Oct. 19 at the Music Box Theater. The film opens nationwide Nov. 2.