1.
I lay in bed on a January night, scrolling on Instagram, as I try to make sense of why my eyes feel teary. I also think of Carl, whose suggested essay prompt led me to watch this movie. I think of my opening sentence, the essay itself, what do I have to say? What would I write that won’t be too vapid? There’s no response to this.
When Brandy dials Clara (or Dorothy) in the last scene of “Hotel Reverie,” across what seems to be a kind of metaverse, I thought of it as the most beautiful thing. In that scene, both of them, in an alternate world, have their eyes glued to a screen as I do, such that it becomes a story involving three people in parallel universes. I suppose I must be the one with the complete story, the character in the real world. But who is to say that there are indeed only three of us, that the sequence ends with me, and not that I am simply unwilling to accept the truth, just as Clara wrestles with it when Brandy confesses to her about their existence as software objects in a simulation?
“Hotel Reverie” is an episode in the Netflix series, Black Mirror. The story, which is the third episode of its seventh season, opens with Kimmy pitching Redream, a hi-tech virtual reality software that creates a fictive dimension where movies are directed in real-time, to Judith Keyworth. Judith heads the struggling but legacy Keyword Pictures studio, which once produced an old British romance classic for which this episode is named.
The episode tells the story of a disgruntled A-list actress, Brandy Friday. She is known for playing supporting lead roles, and feels limited and unfulfilled by this. Brandy, as she tells her manager, wants more. This happens for her, eventually, as the lead character in the Redream remake of the erstwhile Hotel Reverie. Still, the story does not end with Brandy feeling satisfied; it fails to replace the void she complains about with a complete sense of personhood. These moments exist rather in her trance as her acting avatar enters Redream. In the limbo, she finds herself locked in with Clara.
While watching “Hotel Reverie,” my mind recalled stories from my lucid dreams, those where I felt deeply disassociated. I cannot point to the why of this, but a part of me thought it necessary to compare Brandy’s experience with mine. Was I ever happy? I hardly think so, because, unlike Brandy’s smooth extraction from the metaverse of Redream, for instance, my dreams often end with a hypnic jerk. A sort of forceful removal. And why so? Do I break a rule? Does my screaming and anxiety alter the serenity of the dimension such that a forceful removal becomes mandatory?
I defy gravity in my dreams. The apparitions I meet know that I am new. I am a babe learning to walk on air. The roads are paved and new because no one uses them. The houses have no doors or owners. And time is relative, perceived only as plot. The dream always ends with me standing before a beautiful, blue sea. This is where my anxiety rises. I cannot swim, and the sight of such a vast body of water terrifies me, turning what should have been a soothing moment into dread. My head swerves. I scream “No!” in every language I know, thrashing and kicking against the invisible force dragging me relentlessly to the sea. And then, the jerk.
The few times I have tried to self-extract, might I call it that, my body and mind become paralysed.
2.
Rene Descartes’ dualism describes the human body and mind as separate entities. I suppose Brandy tries to prove this. Her consciousness operates freely as Descartes posited in the Meditations. It is in Redream, trapped with Dorothy—or it is Clara now?—that she finds happiness. In that virtual, fictional movie set, her consciousness alone makes both poor and good judgments and experiences a range of emotions. I think the story also questions the limits of dualism, although I am not sure the scriptwriters intended this. But I—as other viewers, perhaps—can only interpret this in the fashion most sensible to me.
Brandy’s body, detached from her mind, still provides physical responses to the emotions she experiences in the simulation. For instance, in the last scene showing Dorothy’s death, tears streak down Brandy’s cheek, in the physical world, even before her body regains consciousness. This reminds me of the central weakness of dualism: if mind and body are separate, what governs their interaction?
I am, however, more fascinated by Dorothy. I feel drawn to her absurdist mindset, her willingness to live vicariously in the absence of true meaning. When she walks into the black void or liminal space outside the borders of the set, she is exposed to the entire Redream database and somehow returns, not with despair but even more passion that she plays the piano. But to what exhaustion can one discern the absurdity of their existence in such a void?
Rather, as Albert Camus suggested, one must give up the search for meaning to walk out of it. I wonder, now, however, if this search would truly leave us satisfied. And not that we become overwhelmed by the gravity of the purpose we so passionately seek or are underwhelmed by how little we matter to the bottom line. Imagine a world where relevance is accorded to each based on one’s role in a universal plot. One where class division is defined, not by the disparity of wealth but by narrative significance and proximity to the central story. Or that wealth is divided based on this. I should think this is already the case, since wealth and power are the driving forces behind every major decision. Value is measured by influence, and chaos emerges from the relentless competition to remain relevant. The rest of us, non-bourgeois, existing as secondary casts in this zero-sum world, can only find solace in aphorisms that tell us it is wise to accept life as nothing but a meaningless pantomime.
I find it hard to identify when and if Dorothy truly dies. When the character is shot, is it Dorothy or Clara who is killed? When the Redream team restarts the software, Dorothy’s consciousness merges back with her film persona, Clara, and we return to the scene of the second murder attempt in the hotel room. Clara appears to have no recollection of the past, but it was hard for me to accept. As the story progressed, I found myself trying to identify which character I was watching in each scene. Dorothy or Clara: I muttered to myself again and again. But even so, it is not her death that brought me close to tears, or the overly advertised closing line, “I am yours forevermore.” Rather, it was the eventual extraction of Brandy from Redream—against her enduring desire to remain connected to it—that touched me.♦
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Beloved John is a journalist based in Abuja. She was a runner-up at the Sanlam Financial Journalism Awards in 2025.