Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams - Real Life - REVIEW

The thing that has impressed me the most about Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams series is that production values for each and every one of these short movies is maintained at an incredibly high level. They're gloriously rich with detail, costumes, gadgets and sets that each episode is full of visual splendour, and "Real Life" is no exception.

Sarah is a traumatised cop. She looks at the world through the eyes of a person who looks around at all of the things, the people, the life she has, and she constantly tells herself it is too perfect, and that she doesn't deserve it.

Apart from the trauma. Apart from the constant thoughts that something is wrong, and that she doesn't quite belong. Her wife, Katie tries to fix this, by bringing her a little gift.

The gift?

She gets a "vacation chip" that puts her into a dream state - a vacation away from her life. In the first few moments of her new "life", the dream is filled with darkness and mystery - what is portrayed as a small time gang-war incident is the catalyst for much more, in terms of storytelling.

It hardly seems like a vacation at all, with several people left dead, a concussion, and Sarah finding herself back in her normal body, with a question mark hanging over what she had just experienced - The sort of thing that would traumatise a normal person. So... how is this meant to help a cop relax?

Very quickly, this episode plays at the suggestion that we are capable of becoming another being, another person in our dreams, and in our sleep, particularly when Sarah finds herself in her own body once more the following day, feeling that something is off.

"A vacation from your life". A line repeated throughout this movie. A suggestion that is constant, and one that seems less like a vacation, and more like a parallelism between two individuals that seemed to be interlinked in a single psyche.

And a vacation chip that keeps our traumatised cop attached to both her own reality, and the one she encounters in her chip-led dreams. One in which both individuals know there is something brewing, something wrong with the reality they are perceiving.

The line between the real world and the vacation world is one that increasingly loses its sense of distinction. As the viewer, you are never quite sure which is the true reality that Philip K Dick's story is trying to tell.

In one world a traumatised cop, in the other, George multi-billionaire company owner with an assassinated wife - also Katie. But they both want a different life. They both want a vacation. They're linked. Somehow. Through the dream machine, through different worlds.

This is a theme that I am noticing increasingly in Philip K Dick's work as I explore his catalogue of story telling more deeply. The stories are all interesting. They are fundamentally about people, and this makes them incredibly accessible, even if they are often gatekept behind the barrier of being "science fiction".

Really good, thought provoking stuff.