While watching the movie, I thought of a different explanation (although it doesn’t explain much, it’s pretty much just the way I thought David Lynch meant us to see it). Throughout the movie there was a multitude of evidence suggesting it was a dream, but the moment it clicked for me was when Betty and Rita were exploring Diane Selwyn’s house. In the scene, Betty and Rita broke into Diane Selwyn’s house after Rita’s spotty memory randomly allowed her to remember the name. The inside of the house looked as if no one had been there in a while, and when they looked in the bedroom, they found a woman lying dead and decomposing on the bed.
It was clear from then on that the part of the movie we had seen so far, as well as the characters in it, existed in some sort of alternate dimension. The dead woman on the bed was decayed to the point where her face was indiscernible, but from her hair and general body type, I assumed it was Betty, or at least her equivalent in a different reality. However, instead of assuming it was a dream sequence as a normal intuitive viewer might have, my mind immediately jumped to the possibility that Betty was already dead. I watched the rest of the movie under this impression; I believed that the Betty to whom we had been introduced was a projection of the real Betty (who I now know as Diane), but as an ideal version of herself.
Once we went through the blue box and into the alternate reality, aspects of Diane’s life could be seen mirrored in Betty’s, except it was in fact a much worse version. While Betty is conscientious and kind to a fault, Diane is bitter, self-interested, and unpleasant towards others. Betty proves to us that she is a gifted actress, capable of easily ensnaring an entire room. Diane is an actress whose skill is relatively unknown, but we can assume she lacks at least charisma because she is overshadowed by Camille (Rita in the alternate reality). Diane is unsanitary, addicted to drugs, and overall a depressing specimen, whereas Betty is upbeat and seemingly very contented with her life. From my perspective, the entire movie was supposed to be a juxtaposition of who we are on the outside and who we want to be subconsciously. I don’t have a much deeper analysis of this movie, but hopefully this can provide a different perspective from the overused “dream within a dream but really it’s reality” theme.
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Intro to Philosophy of Film 
This is a very unique perspective. I like the Sixth Sense-like idea that Betty was dead the whole time (I hope everyone has seen that movie and I haven’t ruined the ending). Maybe the whole story is a final hallucination of the dying Diane and she really was dead, or at least dying, the whole time. One idea I hadn’t considered before is that the puff of smoke is her hallucination; she shoots herself and then sees the story we just watched. After all, the smoke does have the faces of several of the characters from the story in it.
I did find the fact that they see the corpse odd. It is almost a foreshadowing to Diane’s death later in the film. But why would Diane imagine seeing her dead body? Perhaps she is already considering suicide and because she feels so alone and forgotten, she assumes that no one will find her body and she will be left to decompose. Maybe it’s her way of playing out a realistic option.
The alternate dimension idea intrigues me. Possibly, Diane and Betty are two options of how a story could play out. However, if that is the case, why does Betty disappear when the box is opened?