Virtually speaking...

After almost two years of my debut as a blogger (thanks to my steadfast, and more importantly, cyber-competent pal, Atool,) that started with a revelation of the domination of the cyberworld in my life, I decided it was time for part II of my virtual reality deliberation.

I still maintain that the best scene in Disclosure is where Tom Sanders enters the virtual representation of his company’s database, and often wonder how it would be to have that option in real life --- plug in different situations in a computer program and look at cause and effect, or better still, experience a wide array of emotions and actions Matrix-style from a wire-entangled pod.

For a predominantly computer phobic person, I am unusually fascinated by the world of simulations, and AS a computer-phobic person I do think my mind does a better job of it.

Since I left my high school days behind me (where my biggest worry was usually along the lines of “Do I begin with the homework or finish reading ‘Doctors’?”), more often than not, my most promising moment of the day has been draping the comforter around me from anywhere between 12 and 3 am, shutting out the real world and getting lost in ‘the beyond’ of beautiful dreams.

You’re constantly hearing people talk about fulfilling their dreams and translating their fantasies into reality. I, for one, want quite a few of my dreams to stay a dream. Isn’t it more fun to dream a dream than live a dream?

Be it Enid Blyton’s “enchanted land” series, landing the A-6 intruder at New York’s Intrepid museum or “Back to the future” at Universal Studios, I’ve been quite happy in my closeted little world of illusions right from somewhere around age six to two decades later.

When it was time for the monthly family movie outing, my sis always wanted the depressingly real 1947-Earth, I wanted Speed where a bus could jump over freeways or Jurassic Park where dinosaurs could roam the earth. My favorite show on TV is the most feel-good and unrealistic of them all--- six Manhattan residents spending 24 hours a day in a coffee shop and still living in fancy apartments. It may not exactly scream “reality” but let’s face it, I wouldn’t sit in front of a celluloid screen if I just wanted to see day-to-day life on the street. My fire-escape allows an unbiased view :)

I don’t know if I’ll ever go on a treasure hunt through ten different countries and I’m pretty sure I won’t ever sell outrageously priced chocolates on the streets of New York, but I got it all by sitting glued to every wheezing breath in the first season of The Amazing Race and one too many acerbic remarks in The Apprentice.

A lot of times I feel more excited about plopping down on my couch and sitting down for a full hour of Real Time or three of a Wimbledon men’s final than about meeting up with a good friend or calling a long lost pal who would guaranty a few laughs.

Is it because anything could go wrong in an I-am-breathing-the-same-air-you-are relationship while the one on the small screen is protected not only by layers of nitrocellulose, but also from the callousness that destiny seems so eager to impose in real life? Is it less complicated and more rewarding to live lives “through our heads”?

Is it a milder (I hope!) version of multiple personality syndrome, where we constantly try to compartmentalize our lives into the “perfect virtual” ones and the “not-so-perfect real” ones?

Do we just want to keep these two worlds strictly apart, instead of trying to find a compromise that may result from an ineffective transposition? Are dreams just a way of overlooking the trials and tribulations of the harsh world out there?

Can we live our entire lives being happy and satisfied in the pristine uncorrupted world upstairs, never bringing them out into the very tainted real one that threatens to throttle them in infancy?

Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg apart, can the virtual ever be real?