Something that Monday made me think about is dreams vs. nightmares, and when does a dream become a nightmare. In the context of VR, when does the dream of a virtual reality become a nightmare?
I think about “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and how the audience and the actors were happy to give themselves to the VR world of the play until Puck revealed himself at the end. Then, it became a nightmare for pretty much everyone involved, especially with the sinister artwork of the last couple panels. This led me to wonder about other stories we’ve read in class, and when their dreams became nightmares (if they did at all). For example, in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” when the man realizes that what he used to know, his VR of the cave, is an illusion, does that illusion become a nightmare to him?
There’s also the questions of who decides if the VR is a dream or a nightmare. I think we’ll get into this a lot more next week, when we discuss The Handmaid’s Tale, but I think it is definitely something to think about.
I think you bring up some really interesting questions about the terminology we’ve been using throughout the semester. We frequently discuss the threshold between dream and reality, and how it has been manifested in many of the texts we’ve read. However, something that does not appear as often is the threshold between dreams and nightmares, as it is much harder to differentiate between the two. Typically, we just consider dreams to be “good” experiences and nightmares to be “bad” experiences– but, doesn’t this depend entirely upon the individual?
I agree with the first comment. I think that the perspective is important to note when defining a dream or nightmare. You write that an individual can change their mind about VR; something that may have been a dream can become a nightmare to an individual. The definition also changes person to person. What may be a dream for someone might be a nightmare for someone else. I think the Handmaid’s Tale is the perfect example of this phenomenon.
The notion of dream versus nightmare is also brought up in Facade. The importance of perspective, as the previous commentors have noted, is exemplified here. While most of us would label a nightmare as one where we are in danger or worse off than our current situation, for Element Girl, a nightmare is one where she is living a life of normalcy, because that’s the one thing she can never have. Her perspective completely reorients where the threshold between dream and nightmare lies, because her waking world is already nightmarish for her.