First of all, if you haven’t seen this show, or even if you have but have misinterpreted the premise (a LOT of people have), let’s clear something up from the beginning: it’s not a sci-fi show, at least not in the sense of representing dual realities:
In a nutshell, the guy had a car accident and either his wife or his son died. When he goes to sleep, he dreams a full day of the alternate scenario being true. But he can’t tell which is the dream and which is the reality. We need to accept as a given, as part of the premise, that his mind can create a perfectly detailed, complex and dynamic reality. If there’s any “sci-fi” element to the show, you could say that’s it; but it is one of the basic conditions of this thought experiment.
So: other than suicide or intentional brain damage, is there any way to “reality test” that’s foolproof?
Any scenario involving reading a book or watching a movie he hasn’t seen before and doing so again “on the other side” to compare is undermined IMO by the fact that if his subconscious is determined to keep him unaware of which is the dream, it will be made to be that even if he reads/watches it first in reality, it still won’t match in the dream even though the subconscious would be capable of making it match.
Yup, and this guy has already done it: He cut himself badly enough to cause severe pain, in the “world” where his wife is still alive. I wasn’t sure that was significant when I thought that both worlds might be somehow real - but if the creators are saying one is a dream, then that’s not the world where he cut himself.
The lead’s wife is alive. His son is dead. Hard thing to live with, especially since this means he doesn’t get to sleep with the hot tennis coach.
Take a difficult cross word puzzle. look in the back of the book for the answers and see if the answer is correct. In order for the answer to be correct the subconscious would have to be able solve it instantly. Its possible that the sub-conscious could convince him that the answer was correct even when it wasn’t, but if that was the case his sub-conscious could convince him of anything (that pigs fly) and so there would be no way to determine the truth.
This solution reminds me of some of the most frustrating dreams I have, where in I am trying to solve a riddle, and then wake up and realize that the riddle probably actually has no real answer.
I’ve never dreamed real pain - have you? I’ve dreamed the fear of pain, the expectation of imminent pain - “oh shit, this is gonna hurt” - but I always wake right before the pain would hit. There’s a reason that “pinch me, I’m dreaming” is a cliche. And it makes good sense, even from an evolutionary perspective - if you’re sleeping in the forest or whatever, you really don’t want to be sleeping through painful stimuli. Better to err on the side of waking from imaginary pain than to nap through a real mauling.
I like Buck Godot’s idea, but his caveat makes his solution slightly less than “ironclad” IMO.
Mr. Excellent, I don’t see the cutting of his hand as being proof. Why can’t he just dream that it really hurt? (Agreed about the hot tennis instructor though, LOL.)
BTW, for anyone who hasn’t watched this you should really check it out on Hulu. One of the best pilots I’ve seen in years.
ETA: I think we are supposed to understand this type of dreaming as more vivid (including pain, possibly) than the dreams we have IRL.
I learned not to trust what show producers say about their shows while I was a fan of Lost.
Some reviews I’ve read say that there are hints in the series of some kind of “dark conspiracy” that may have some explanatory role in what’s happening to the protagonist.
I’ll wait til the series is over to decide whether it’s fantasy, science fiction or purely realistic. Also, I’ll wait til then to decide whether it’s worth watching.
I got burned by Lost.
As for knowing whether you’re in a dream or not, the thing about dreams is, unless you go into a lucid state, you can be completely incoherent in rational terms yet believe you’re completely coherent. So within a dream I do not know that it’s possible to know anything.
That can’t work. They already tried it. The psychiatrist printed off the Constitution and he read from the middle of it. She says “If this is a dream, [and you never memorized it,] how did you read, word for word, from the Constitution?”
Thing is, he has no way of knowing if he’s right. If he’d read “the President must always wear his shoes on the wrong feet,” he’d have no idea that his brain had filled in the wrong information for that page. He’d assume he was right.
So the “answer trivia” approach is already falsified.
The two showrunners and the guy who plays the protagonist say it’s nothing like that. Sure, I guess they could change their minds later, but I really don’t expect them to. What I think is really interesting is that the three of them already know which is the dream and which isn’t. I was expecting they would leave that to decide later, but apparently not. The actor who plays the main character won’t even tell his wife though–it’s a secret only those three people know.
But if he had dreamed about the shoes, when he woke up in the “real” world, wouldn’t he have realized that it didn’t make any sense? Also, since he read from the Constitution correctly (I assume), does that mean that we know which is the correct reality? I hope not because that seems too simplistic.
Assuming this is true, I’m surprised they even told the lead. This is the type of thing I don’t think I’d want to know, were I in his shoes as it just clouds your judgment when you’re on screen.
Frankly, as a viewer, I was perfectly able to suspend my disbelief and just assume that, for the purposes of this show, BOTH universes are 100% real. It’s just a tad disappointing to realize that, no, that’s not happening here.
The best way to end the series would be to do so in a way that doesn’t resolve the question in one way or the other. It’s not interesting either way. What’s interesting is how the protagonist is handling the problem while the problem is occuring.
But I know that’s asking too much from the medium…
Agreed. I’ve dreamed, several times, about reading a book- generally the one I fell asleep reading. In the dream, I was able to continue reading, my mind filling in the words, and it made perfect sense to me. When I woke up, though, I realized that what I’d read made no sense at all.
What’s interesting - and I imagine they’ll keep this up - is that the edits don’t show transitional activity. You don’t see him driving to the psychiatrist’s office. Or riding up the elevator. Or walking in the door. Cut to scene, he’s in the therapist’s chair. How did he get there? Who knows.
Anyway, an ironclad way of proving the dream-state is to enlist the therapist’s help. Ask each therapist to tell him one secret from their life that no one else knows. Then take that universe’s therapist to the other universe’s therapist for a meet-up.
If this is reality, there is no way that the therapist you’ve only met in your dream could give you truthful information.
I’d think it would be pretty easy: don’t try to test it while you’re awake, test it while you’re asleep. In short: if you’re awake in world A and someone tries to wake you up in world B, what happens? And if you’re awake in world B and someone tries to wake you up in world A, what happens?
I think this is functionally a ‘brain in a vat’-kind of situation, so there’s no way to tell for sure. Every proposal including some sort of error present in the dream world, I think, is doomed, because as Frylock notes, whatever supplies the dream reality does not have to supply a coherent, consistent reality, but merely induce the belief that the protagonist is experiencing such. The dream-world could ‘really’ be filled with tap-dancing pink elephants, but the logic would be altered such that this seemed perfectly ordinary. If your logic is broken, you can’t tell, because you can’t rely on what you’d use to do that, i.e. your logic. It’s like a blind spot: it’s not the not-seeing that’s the problem, it’s the not-seeing of the not-seeing.
He could commit suicide. If he does it in the dream world then he’d wake up in the real one. If he did it in the real world the problem would be solved.
Going off my previous post, you have universe 1 with the female therapist and universe 2 with the male therapist.
You’re in universe 1, you ask the female therapist for a secret, which only she knows.
Then you’re in universe 2. You ask the male for a secret too. And you take the male to see the female to tell her secret in front of both of them.
If universe 1 is real and 2 is a dream, then the female would have supplied good information that can be confirmed by universe 2’s female.
If universe 1 is a dream and 2 is real, there’s absolutely no way the female can tell you a secret in your dream and it be the truth in reality.
You can then verify this by trying the reverse with the male therapist through the two realities.
