Sleep No More

I once heard someone say that cinema is a window into other people’s dreams. If that’s true, I thought, games are a window we can reach our hands through. In a fumbling way, we steer the course of events on the other side of the screen. But developers have never been able to make us forget our surreal vantage, as dreamers do. The promise and threat of virtual reality is to finally pull us through the window. Why else would Sony name their headset Project Morpheus, after Ovid’s god of dreams?

A convincing simulation is one that’s hard to wake up from. A story in Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, a book of arch sci-fi fables, suggests VR’s potential as both an escape and trap for the mind. The vizier Subtillion builds a series of “dream cabinets” for his king, each promising a fantastic diversion. But in truth each of the cabinets is a snare meant to prey on the king’s vices and lock his distracted mind within the machine, “sink[ing] into dreams lurking within dreams.”