What was particularly savvy about the Wachowskis' comic-book movie was that its mirror-shade cool reflected any number of readings -- Marxist, Lacanian, utterly stoned. Perhaps most surprising, and influential, was its use of religious symbols and viewpoints. Most viewers picked up on the Christian elements of the first film, which center on Neo's role as a savior figure, but the deep frame of both movies is a more esoteric pop stew of Gnostic and Buddhist ideas. The Gnostics of antiquity transformed the analogy of Plato's cave into a full-blown and harrowing cosmology: We are strangers trapped in a strange land, they argued, immortal sparks slumbering in a material cosmos fashioned by an evil or ignorant demiurge and his nefarious archons. The Buddhist analysis is less personalistic: We are stuck on the delusive merry-go-round of samsara, an almost mechanical system of causes and conditions that fools us into believing the self and the world are substantially real. In both cases, we step toward the light not through grace or the remission of sins, but through the direct awakening of insight into our condition. Neo must swallow his pill and take the ride himself.

Opening in theaters on Buddha's birthday, "The Matrix Reloaded" clearly places itself in a crypto-religious landscape. There's a ship called the Logos, characters like Seraph and Persephone and Neo's hushed worship by the multiculti masses of Zion. Neo's mystic powers are growing as well: His "second sight," which allows him to see into the underlying code inside the Matrix, lets him read energy bodies and, in a remarkable fusion of Christ myth and shamanism, resurrect Trinity by removing a bullet embedded in her body. But "The Matrix Reloaded" would have been lame if it had simply followed its Gnostic bodhisattva superhero around as he kicked ass in Jesuit robes. Instead, to keep the cognitive sparkle, the Wachowskis altered the conceptual maps of the two worlds that Neo moves through: Zion and the Matrix.

In the first film, these two worlds had the virtue of simplicity: We slipped neatly between the world of the Matrix, with its single nefarious agenda, and the revolutionary messianic world of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. But "The Matrix Reloaded" complicates these two worlds. Before the Nebuchadnezzar even arrives at Zion, we realize that Morpheus -- previously the hierophantic voice of truth -- may simply be crazy, an irrational demagogue, a renegade believer. Meanwhile, the Matrix grows far more complex. In the first film we sensed a unity of purpose and design behind the agents and their urban landscape, but now we confront a Babel of programs: rogue self-replicating agents, the power-mad Merovingian, the intuitive Oracle, all competing in an open-ended nest of potentially infinite regress. As the Oracle admits to Neo, it's a pickle: There's no way for him to know what's going on or whom to believe.

The Matrix comes to resemble the multifarious world of shamanism rather than the black-and-white world of the Christian afterlife. Neo, the otherworldly voyager, encounters a wide variety of beings, each with his or her own contradictory raps and agendas, and none entirely trustworthy. The architecture of the Matrix has also become pickled, an Escheresque Swiss cheese of transdimensional hallways and quantum portals. If "The Matrix" was all about screens and mirror shades, "The Matrix Reloaded" is all about keys and doors. The keys are codes of course, the language of encryption, but they are also the keys of magicians navigating through angel-space. And the portals we keep passing through remind us that the action lies between the worlds, as the conventional cartography of the Matrix melts into the metamorphic palaces of dream.

After all, however much you resonate with the cabalistic or Marxist metaphors, the Matrix most resembles the shifting virtual worlds that our brain conjures nightly. The first glimpse that "The Matrix Reloaded" gives us of the Matrix -- when Trinity falls to her apparent demise beneath a rain of bullets -- turns out to be a recurrent dream in Neo's head. What makes this dream a nightmare is not just Trinity's death, but Neo's own inability to intervene in the scenario. We've all gotten caught in these hypnagogic snares, where you face some horror but cannot move -- encased, as it were, in the amber of dream time. What we want in these moments is the secret wish whose fulfillment animates these films: the desire to awaken inside the phantom world and wrest control from the dream machine.

On this level of psychic control, both Matrix films can be read as instruction manuals for lucid dreamers. As the first film suggests, the simple knowledge that one is dreaming is not usually enough to exert control on the illusory world; instead, one achieves full creative action only after a lot of training in the dreaming dojo. The first thing that a lot of dreamers do when they first go lucid is also one of the first visual pleasures "The Matrix Reloaded" gives us: flight. Neo's bat-winged cruise through the moonstruck heavens is not just a Superman reference, but also a specific invocation of our own dream experience. This is what people don't understand about the Wachowskis' special effects, many of which revolve around virtual camera moves impossible to generate in the real world. Remember the subconscious equation of film: I am the camera. When the Wachowskis propel their camera faster than a speeding bullet, when it swoops and dives with angelic grace or whips through a frozen moment of space-time -- these novel perceptions strike us at first as virtual experiences, familiar only through dream time or trance.

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