Comparisons between VR and dreams come up a lot in this article, as well they should.
Van Loon’s piece stuck with me not just because of the subject matter, but because it made me aware of my own body in a startling way. I hadn’t felt like a floating avatar or a ghost, as sometimes happens in VR; I was very aware of my own physicality. The experience rested in the back of my mind, like a lingering dream…
Van Loon’s perspective startled me. “I’m very excited by this idea that [VR] connects the mind and the body,” he says. Wait, what? I thought. Then, as he went on to remind me that VR more or less short-circuits the ways the brain deals with images, I realized he was correct. You might jump the first time a monster appears in a horror movie, he says, but probably not the second or third time you watch the movie. But in a VR experience — he cites one in which you’re standing on top of a tall building, feeling vertigo — your brain can’t quite handle it, and your body reacts: “There’s nothing I can tell myself that will take away from this reaction, and I think that’s such a powerful tool for storytelling, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.”
