REM

The impetus of this story started out as a dream. I have had several dreams where I felt emotions more deeply than when I am awake. I wondered about having the power to control your dreams. Would that be beneficial? Would it leave a person refreshed the next day, nightmare free? Or would people fall into yet another form of escapism?
The closest that I have ever gotten to completely escaping reality in a sense that was both frightening and liberating, was through dissociation. My dissociative states can be attributed to my anxiety disorder. It is a sense of losing touch with reality. At these times it feels as if I am looking at everything surrounding me through a lens. As if it was a movie and not my life. My reality becomes a fantasy – something untrustworthy and unreal. When my body moves, it does not feel like I am moving. When I speak, it does not feel like I am in control of my mouth. It feels as if my brain is going to escape the top of my head and disappear into nothingness. It seems scary from an objective perspective, but for me it is absolutely liberating, being detached from any and all depression and anxiety for a few precious minutes...and then I come back to earth and nothing has truly changed. There are even times where the dissociative state becomes a nightmare. I cannot speak. I cannot move. I am drowning. But, to my chagrin, I still crave it sometimes.
This is exactly what Dehan looks for in REM. He needs that sense of losing touch, being lifted out of his body and into a fantasy world; that he soon loses control of. He dissociates into this fantasy world, away from his grief, obsession and even his son, but every time he comes back down to earth, nothing has changed and he is left to wonder if it is even worth it. In the end the fantasy becomes a nightmare and he is forced to recognize his unhealthy behaviour of escapism and obsession and finds his love for his son once again.
I looked at one of my favourite series Black Mirror (Brooker, 2011) – a contemporary version of The Twilight Zone focused on techno-paranoia, for inspiration. All the stand-alone episodes revolve on a future technological invention and how it ruins lives. But it isn’t about AI rising up to kill us all. It is about how technology can ruin even the most normal, everyday relationships and lives. It can break up a marriage,
it can make you lose your sense of self, it can lead you astray. Technology, specifically the advance of cellphones, movie theatres, television and social media, is becoming an integral part of life and it has already begun to influence society and the way we act towards each other and ourselves.
I wanted to write a story that shows how a normal person, a normal family, can be ruined not only by a technological device, but also grief, denial, anger, depression. The technology offers a way of escapism that only heightens the obsession and denial the characters experience.