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This whole idea of "waking up" is a key idea in a number of philosophies explored in the film. In ancient Eastern philosophy - the Indian Vedanta philosophy of the Upanishads, Taoism, and Buddhism - the key to waking up is Enlightenment and a correct understanding of the relation of the self to the external world. In existentialism, we have to wake up to our personal freedom and our responsibility for creating our own selves and lives. And in the situationism of Guy Debord and others, we have to wake up from the sugar-coated spell of consumer society.

Our first wake up call is that from attachment to the past, to the ego as an individual and unconnected entity, and to material things over the spiritual unity of the universe. This call awakens us to our connection to everything around us, and to a meaningful life.⁽¹⁾

The second wake up call in Waking Life comes from existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartre's notions that we are condemned to be free, and that if we make excuses for our not having this freedom, we are living in bad faith. Sartre distinguished in-itself physical being, like that of rocks, which have no consciousness and thus no freedom, from for-itself conscious being, which we human beings have. As in-itself beings, we are fundamentally free to make our own choices, to chart our own course in life. Brute matter may frustrate our plans, yet we always have a choice. We are thrown into this world, and it's up to us to do the best job we can at creating our selves, much as an artist strives to paint an evocative painting, or a sculptor chisels away at a mass of rock to create a compelling statue.