Some days make you want to crawl back into the womb and hide. Now you can. The PBS three-part program “9 Months That Made You’’ takes you back to those amniotic days, as it uses CGI and other high-tech means to show in graphic detail the up-to-the minute process of gestation and explicate the subtle dance of genetics in determining a unique individual.

Equally fascinating are the examples of genetic mutations, such as half the Brazilian family in Episode One, “The First Eight Weeks,’’ who demonstrate talent at playing musical instruments and catching soccer balls. Turns out they have six fingers on each hand. Some traits are more internalized, such as the fearlessness displayed by surfer Laird Hamilton, a characteristic apparently passed down to his children.

“9 Months That Made You’’ will be available on Tuesday on DVD for $24.99 and also on digital download.

www.pbs.org/program/nine-months-that-made-you

Dream team

As Wim Wenders speculated in his futuristic epic, “Until the End of the World’’ (1991), the ultimate documentary technology will be a device that can record dreams. We haven’t reached that stage yet, but in the meantime five independent filmmakers have banded together to take a shot at re-creating the land of Nod in “collective:unconscious,’’ a portmanteau project in which they attempt to re-create not their own, but one of their colleague’s dreams.

In “Black Soil, Green Grass,’’ Daniel Patrick Carboneis renders Lauren Wolkstein’s dream about a bleak dystopia where watchtowers broadcast over loudspeakers a Big Brotherish voice counting sheep. A man records his grandmother singing to fight the tower.

In “First Day Out,’’ Josephine Decker adapts Lily Baldwin’s dream about African-Americans recounting their first return to the real world after being released from prison.

Their voices speak of the experience as dreamlike, a comparison underscored by images of what looks like a rap video choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Frances Bodomo’s offers everybody’s favorite anxiety dream: the gym class. In Lauren Wolkstein’s creepily comic “Beemus, It’ll End in Tears’’ the angst is complicated by gender confusion, an apocalyptic gym teacher and an active volcano.

Macabre slapstick comedy eases the archetypal terror of Bodomo’s “Everybody Dies,’’ a rendition of Decker’s dream about the title game show hosted by “Rita the Reeper.’’ And though everybody dies in this dream, it seems like African-Americans die more violently and with greater frequency in than others as they are shot by police, shot by people who believe themselves to be police, or are run over by police cars in a high-speed chase. The show is brought to you by Newport cigarettes.

Finally, Baldwin in “Swallowed’’ re-creates Carbone’s dream about a woman choking on the dream of middle-class happiness.

She has a hunky husband, hip friends, a baby, a house in the suburbs, and manifestations similar to those in David Cronenberg’s “The Brood’’ work their way out of her skin.

Do these seem like real dreams? I don’t recall as much interpretive dancing or pulsating soundtracks in my own dreams, but the excruciating balance between nightmare and hilarity seems true to life, or dream-life,, as well as the inexpensive production values. Inevitably – and this is true of documentaries about the real world as well – the chaotic material takes the shape of comprehensible narratives. Otherwise no one would be able to sleep at night.

“collective:unconscious’’ will be available Aug. 9 on Vimeo, YouTube, and in partnership with BitTorrent.

collectiveunconsciousfilm.com

Snap decisions

Journalism lost one of its great originals when Boston-born Bill Cunningham died in June. He was 87. For four decades he snapped hundreds of pictures every day of (often unknown) uniquely or elegantly dressed people on the streets of New York, collaging the pictures into a weekly column in The New York Times that was in itself a snapshot of fashion as lived in the moment.

Richard Press’s documentary “Bill Cunningham New York’’ (2010) deftly does the photojournalist a similar favor — telling his story, showing him at work, and visiting him in the cluttered, monkish Carnegie Hall flat where he lived.

“Bill Cunningham New York’’ is being screened by newportFILM Outdoors at 8:15 p.m. on Thursday at the Ocean Cliff Hotel and Resort Lawn, 65 Ridge Road, Newport, R.I. Admission is free and open to the public.

www.newportfilm.com

Election flawed

With a title that has to be the rhetorical question of the year, “Meet the Donors: Does Money Talk?’’ by documentarian Alexandra Pelosi (yes, her mother is that Pelosi, the House minority leader) looks into the rumor that mysterious moguls invest millions to buy votes for politicians who will do their bidding.

She takes us into the vaping smoke-filled rooms, the tacky fund-raisers, the plush offices of the powerbrokers who hope to decide how our lives will be lived for however long we have left. What she learns you must watch to find out.

Don’t expect to find the Koch brothers, though.

“Meet the Donors: Does Money Talk?’’ debuts on Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

www.hbo.com/documentaries/meet-the-donors-does-money-talk/index.html

Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.