Isn’t This Reality?

The distinction between what is real and what is not cannot always be distinguished by our minds. This phenomenon is often a source of inspiration for literary work, and the best genre for fully exploring it has to be the genre of Science Fiction. In the stories Frozen Journey by Philip K. Dick, and Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury this psychological concept is used both to entertain the reader, and to describe a potent aspect of human nature. That aspect is we often let fantasies of what we desire to be real obscure reality itself, and thereby miss the opportunities that would have fulfilled our dreams.
Frozen Journey’s main character is forced to relive past memories and expected future memories over and over again by a ship’s computer during a long space flight. However, he is so neurotic that he ruins even his most happy memories. This is an important point because if he wasn’t deluded, he might have been able to notice the subtle differences that prove reality from fantasy. An example of this is when he is convinced that the T.V. is empty inside. Even though it is not abnormal in any way, he has been buried so deep in his fantasies of what could be, that when what he has been dreaming about finally comes true, he cannot accept it. The problems in his past had made him paranoid of  harming anything, and he felt extreme guilt for two especially important events in his life: the killing of a bird, and the divorce of his first wife. He dreams of his arrival at a brand new world where he can put these all behind him and start anew with that wife. When this actually happens however, he only believes it to be another dream.
In Mars is Heaven a team of human astronauts land on Mars only to discover that every dead loved one they had were living there. Amazed and pleasantly surprised by this, every member of the crew except the captain immediately abandons the mission to spend time with his dead relatives. These “relatives”, however, were really Martians using telepathic powers to make the humans believe they were with deceased loved ones. Eventually, even the captain succumbs to his desire to reunite with people he has lost. The crew is so overwhelmed with joy at finding these people that they do not take the time to look at the strange discontinuities in their environment. All the unanswerable events that occur are disregarded because the are lost in a fantasy world of their own indirect creation. Only too late does the captain figure out what is really going on, and the Martians kill the entire crew.
In both stories, the distinction between reality and fantasy is blurry at best, and one cannot really distinguish between them. The people directly involved don’t make this distinguishment because they are too deluded to see it. They dream of what they want most, and when that finally comes true, they pass it off as another dream and won’t accept reality. These stories, through the unconventional means available in the genre of science fiction, illustrate this point of human nature beautifully.