Thank you for these great examples, Jack. I’ll check them out.
Somewhere around the eighth grade I discovered science fiction. I think that genre was the most responsible for my love of reading. Quickly tearing through classics by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, I tore equally quick through many established science fiction writers of the time. Over a period of years, I eventually ended up as a fan of writers like Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem.
These were my early gurus, without doubt. Dick’s protagonists were often concerned and confused about the nature of reality. These kinds of questions fed my imagination and gradually amped up my questions about the nature of existence. We can clearly see PKD’s ongoing influences in TV and movies, including for example the dream series Falling Water.
Dream experiences, lucid or otherwise, are not as simple as some psychologists or arm-chair dreamers might make it out. While it’s reasonable that we sometimes process the day’s events through dreaming, it’s also reasonable that there’s more going on than that. It seems very likely to me that programs such as Falling Water emerge out of a desire to express that.
