This show’s premise sounds like it was taken from a Doctor Who episode from 2 years back.
In that show a powerful being kept jerking three people (The Doctor and a married couple) between reality and a dreamworld and they had to decide which was which.
In the end the wife deliberately drives into a brick wall after her spouse is killed in that “world”. Her reasoning is that if his death was real she doesn’t want to live anyway, and if it’s the dreamworld, she’ll be back with her husband.
She was correct, her husband’s death was in the dreamworld.
This won’t work, assuming your subconscious is conspiring to keep you in the dark. All it needs to do is have whichever therapist in the dream world is doing the “confirming” of the secret say “no, that’s not true.” That will leave you knowing no more than you did before.
It means in one universe, you take your therapist to go visit the office of the other therapist so they can all have a pow-wow.
And you’re right, there is the possibility that your subconscious would purposely try to screw it up. So not ironclad. But I think it’s worth a shot as it’s the best chance you have, short of suicide as suggested above.
If you can’t recite the real Constitution word-for-word, why would you be able to recite your dream Constitution word-for-word? “Let’s look up the real version. Hey, this matches what I recited in the office…well, I think it does. I’m pretty sure it’s the same. Uh…maybe not. Or maybe that was real and now I’m recreating it in this dream world…”
This would only work if the dream therapist confirms the secret. If she doesn’t, you can’t draw any conclusion at all. And the same goes for the male therapist. So suppose each therapist went “No, my grandmother wasn’t named Shirley.” How do you know that’s the real therapist and not the dream one lying to you (or legitimately having a different dream grandmother)?
Of course, this is all moot because each therapist is only in one world. They don’t exist in the other one at all. In fact, isn’t he in the same office for each, just decorated differently?
So what you’re saying is she’s "…waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you? "
Set an alarm to 40 minutes from now and go to sleep. If you set the alarm in the “real” world, it’ll wake you up while you were in the middle of doing something in the “dream” world. If it doesn’t, try it again in the other reality.
ETA: BTW I tried watching the first episode and I got bored about 20 minutes in.
Here’s a test that would be very hard to fool, I think: Starting in “state A”, find a book of clever dirty limericks. Open it up and read one. See if you think it seems funny and well constructed. Then memorize it. When you “wake up” into “state B”, see if you can remember the limerick, word for word, and if it still seems funny and well constructed. If it does, then it’s very hard for to have been dreaming “State A” without your subconscious mind being able to write fully constructed clever dirty limericks in basically zero time, which seems fairly impossible.
That seems to violate the rules of Awake as we see them, which is that in both realities he is conscious and able to remember and see things he remembers in the other reality, and is capable of asking questions such as “am I dreaming”, etc.
Am I correct that his lives alternate in order? If a particular day is for example March 8, 2012, then presumably he first experiences one version of March 8, real or dreamed and then another version of March 8 real or dreamed. I think they said the Wife alive/Son dead/new Partner version is the one that comes first for each day?
Ok, so whichever version comes first, he sees the daily headlines, checks the stock market, sees who won the game, etc. Then in the other life he sees if the same major world events repeat. If in the “bottom of the inning” life he knows what’s going to happen, then either it’s a dream or else he’s psychic. The alternative is that virtually all events with a random outcome began diverging from the time of the accident.
DO the two psychiatrists exist in both worlds, even if different versions of history had each end up as the department psychiatrist? Could he run a search and find out?
Suicide has the problem that it could fail. You’d have to come up with a fairly horrible suicide to ensure success, I guess jumping off a very, very high building. Most suicides have failure modes. Otherwise I don’t think it is possible.
Hmmm…that’s an interesting one–might be the best yet. Can you elabourate? So you’d need a confederate, or just an alarm, as PacifistPorcupine said? I suppose the best idea would be to use a sleep lab so they’d know when you are in REM sleep.
What if you try it both ways and in both cases the information is no good? (Or, what **Frylock **said.)
This is pretty good too…although I’d say it’s “only” 99.9% foolproof.
Wait, though: how does he know his subconscious isn’t “editing out” things he vowed to remember to do a “reality test”? Or altering them?
I’m going to have to downgrade that 99.9% to only about 95%.
Oh wow, this is a really good point that seems so simple in retrospect but that I never thought of. If you hadn’t included that last sentence I’d say you had it nailed, but this is a great point: his mind is going to have to alter the passage of events in the dream reality to keep it from being a giveaway. Crazy.
So far, I only see the sleep lab idea as being really ironclad. Ironclad, that is, as long as his visions of being in an alternate world can only happen when he lies down to go to sleep. If he can have them as hallucinations, or develop narcolepsy, even that test becomes less than definitive.
I’d suggest using a confederate on both sides, both to do a better job of waking you up and to observe what happens. If you use an alarm and it doesn’t work, there’s always the possibility that you just slept through it. So I’d have someone available in World A to take notice if you suddenly pass out for no reason, and someone in World B to take notice if you don’t wake up when they pour a glass of iced water on your crotch. And then reverse the setup.
