DEADLY ILLUSIONS
When I was a little kid, I was convinced that I saw a small red airplane land on the street in front of the house. I was sitting at my father’s massive typewriter in the “sun room” he used as an office. I told my mother all about it and she said it wasn’t true. But much later I still believed it happened — it was so vivid. She took me outside and showed me that it wasn’t possible because of all the power and telephone lines. No plane could get past them. But the memory remained.
Since then it’s been interesting to speculate on what the moment meant in terms of symbolism. Did small airplanes mean something to me? Why was it red? Or was there something about my brain, my mind, that was losing the line between real and imagined?
Now this vid film, “Deadly Illusions” picks up the confusion of reality with imagination and mixes it with our suburban lady fantasy about an impossibly gorgeous, rich and betrayed woman. It’s “Pretty Woman” for adults. Everything is immaculate, expensive and unbelievable until pretty soon there’s a unicorn in the garden and the book scrawled with a special pen by this incredibly successful writer is mixed with what is said to be real life. The cigar is no longer just a cigar. Now come all the dreads of nice suburban ladies. The story continues with plot twists. And the fear of women who write wild stuff. A split personality! “I’m a different woman when I write — I’m dangerous!” Wild women!
This movie and many others now inter-edit reality with possibilities but then come back to reality. Several have characters who are dead, but exist in memory where they are able to interact with those who remember them. Sometimes it’s impossible for minutes to tell whether what one is seeing is real or in the heads of the characters. When the story snaps out of the dream, we are as disconcerted as we would be by unlikely plot twists.
When I was an animal control officer, an old man complained that his neighbor, a young woman, had a dog that barked constantly. We went to court and the old man testified a long complex story about the woman and her dog while she sat listening incredulously. It turned out that the old man was deaf and what he was telling the court was the plot of a TV soap opera he thought was real.
This is a known blunder in thinking that is not uncommon with children, old people, people under serious stress, and people with permeable “boundaries” like artists who go in and out of imagination. Then there are those who are captured by aliens, etc. Or captured by Republican senators, who seem in turn to be captured by something we would like to know about. Control? Bribes? Simple corruption? Mafia? Putin?
If you want to read the technical psych material, here’s a beginning. The actual function of which part or interacting parts of the brain cause the phenomenon are not known. It seems to have something to do with sleeping and dreaming.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4569816/
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the illusion is a version of reality agreed upon by a group or whether an outlier is seeing something that is a better, truer version. Maybe you know the story called “In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King.” If what is real depends upon one’s lived experience, then the rich are not real to the poor and vice versa. Each does not believe in the world of the other.
But helping people “return to reality” when their lives have so distorted what they believe, the method can be force that does even more damage. Pressure on artists to conform can destroy their skills. At the other extreme is the idea that there IS no absolute reality but only a stream of sensory information organized by learned concepts. To some people this seems like “anything goes.” But that’s hardly true.
The issue is much sharper now that we have television and computers where we watch powerful visions of life from the points of view of people in foreign countries or from subcultures within our own nations. Claims of misunderstanding and prejudice are hard to argue against.
A woman told me that all men are scoundrels who can’t be trusted because in her life this had been demonstrated. The best way to get her to see otherwise would be experiences with trustworthy men in her actual life — depictions of such fellows on TV were discredited as fantasy. She could not stop believing her earlier conviction. It was a safety feature of her identity.
“Identity Boundaries” are only one kind of limits to the line between what is “in” and what is “out.” It’s a poorly described phenomenon, but maybe the best definition approaches “religion” and is part of that belief system. To avoid the overtones of religion, many of which insist on defining one way of seeing reality and resist any changes, I’ll call this “felt meaning.” There is a growing body of thought about this. In short, it is defined as one’s guide through life about what is the right thing to do, a “gut feeling” that is mostly subconscious rather than thought out and logical. Again, it comes from experience, including feedback from one’s community.
In a time and place where the feedback is strong and maybe individual fantasy or experience are thin, the boundary of what is part of a person can be thick. But a person who has had a different experience — army, college, Peace Corps, travel, books, foreign films — can be more willing to cross their own personal boundary. In anxious, dangerous times — and none is more dangerous than the loss of one’s home — boundaries harden. But if the situation becomes bad enough, boundaries MUST be broken for the sake of survival. Illusions indeed become deadly, including the illusion that there is a place where everything is perfect and everyone is safe.
My vision of a little airplane on our street may have just been a memory of a trip to an airport — I had several relatives who flew small planes — or it may have meant a desire not to fly myself, but to receive a visit from someone who could do that. But no one stepped out of the Piper Cub. Hmmm. Was I waiting for my father at his desk?
