In “Leopoldina’s Dreams”, we learn that Leopoldina can make the things she dreams about appear in reality.  However, because she only dreams about little things like a pebble or feather no one notices the miracle.  I found this to be a really interesting concept in relation to some of the other texts we’ve read and will read in this class.  When I think of stories containing virtual realities, I think of stories like Alice in Wonderland, the Narnia books, or the Matrix.  These stories all contain alternate realities that are fantastical and unlike anything we know in real life.  In the majority of the material we’ve consumed thus far, like Tron or Plato’s Cave Allegory, the protagonist immediately realizes that they’re in an undiscovered world when they shift from one reality to another.  What’s interesting to me about this short story is the idea that one day we could wake up in a virtual reality where almost everything about it was identical except for one tiny thing.  We’d probably never notice that we left our original reality behind.  There could even be magic in our world right now but it’s small and uninteresting enough, so no one knows.  Virtual reality doesn’t need to be flashy or fantastical, it can be a slightly distorted imitation of life.

Another detail that interested me about “Leopoldina’s Dreams” was the fact that the story is narrated by a dog.  At first I didn’t realize that the narrator wasn’t human.  There were some strange details about the narrator that my brain skimmed over because they were just human enough to be passable.  Upon second reading, these details (such as the fact that they have to tell Canguito not to pee in the spring) made so much more sense.  What’s interesting to me about this narrator perspective is that it makes the actions that Changuito tells us about unreliable.  When I read the story a second time, I began by assuming that the dog writing the story was hyper intelligent because it seemed to understand everything that was taking place around it.  However, what if Changuito is a normal dog who has some understanding of the world around him and human interaction but for the most part is confused or misinterpreting his surroundings?  What if Leopoldina can’t make things appear out of her dreams but instead Changuito has the object permanence of a dog and therefore the pebble and feather seem to appear out of thin air to him.  What if he hears conversation incorrectly or only catches parts of sentences and has to fill in the gaps himself?  Whether or not one believes that Canguito is an unreliable narrator, I think it’s important in stories that involve shifting realities to always be wary of the perspective the information in a story is coming from.