The Philosophy of Dream Zanarkand

[Laro]

Final Fantasy X made me think though… what if all of us here on Earth are really just a dream of a planet that was destroyed a long time ago? What if we are all only ghosts, replications of real people who used to exist just like us? In Dream Zanarkand, people don’t go out of the city’s borders, typically. They’re aware that there’s Bevelle and other places in Spira, but really they’re all alone. What if it’s the same with us? We all have a vague idea that there’s intelligent life on other planets, and yet there is only chilling silence.


The only thing is; Dream Zanarkand was a utopia compared to the real Zanarkand. More or less. While on Earth, we have some really fucked up shit going on that could only make it a dystopia…


And maybe we have to sleep in order to support this reality, the way the fayth had to keep “dreaming”? Or something.


I dunno, it’s just this world always feels less real than it should. I can’t quite explain how.


Who knows.

 

[Ayen]

Many people have had this thought before. For a long time we played with the idea that our reality isn't really reality. It what inspired moves like the Matrix. I didn't save the link and it was some time ago, but I remember seeing an article suggesting that our universe could be (and I think this was just putting it in simple terms) a video game, and for some reason some people were happy at this thought.

I don't ponder on these thoughts too much myself, but it always make for good discussion.

 

[Dionysos]

As the title of this thread states, the idea of Dream Zanarkand is drawn from philosophy. I don’t know much about Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, and Hindusim, etc, but I imagine that there may be things there related to it too (considering that Spira is based on South Asia). However, in Western philosophy this theme pops up from time to time, and it is now a part of popular culture (thanks largely to The Matrix, etc).

From the classical period of Ancient Greece we have Plato’s famous cave allegory. This story imagined people who were chained up in a cave, only capable of facing the back of the cave and could only see shadows created by objects and statues passing in front of a fire by free people, etc. They took these shapes to be forms of ‘reality’. One of the prisoners escapes his chains and is able to look behind himself to see the objects and statues which formed the shadows, and adjusts his concept of reality to consider that they are ‘real’. Finally, the prisoner escapes the cave entirely and sees everything in true forms, again adjusting to become fully aware of reality. There's more to it too, but the allegory is akin to a person freeing his or her mind and seeing things for how they really are (through philosophy, etc). Tidus takes a long time to adjust to encountering reality, and he is confused for the majority of the game about the state of Zanarkand in real Spira, and a lot of this is due to denial.

Following similar lines of thought, Descartes also touches on how a person cannot rely only on senses, since the senses can convince a dreaming person that the dream is real while dreaming. Applying this, Tidus believed his Zanarkand was real, and his senses convinced him that everything and everyone he knew was real. Tidus was fooled.

More recently we have Jean Baudrillard (an important influence on The Matrix) arguing that our modern consumer culture has us living in a world filled with simulations and representations of things which can distract us from reality. Or something along those lines, I’m not intimately familiar with it and only read about it with relation to The Matrix. What we see of Dream Zanarkand, with its modern distractions, fits a consumer culture model like this. The 1990s world inhabited by Mr. Anderson / Neo in The Matrix is also like this. The point being that these places are like our own times in this way, with thousands of modern, meaningless distractions.

Dream Zanarkand does look amazing, but I don’t know if we see enough of it to judge it as a fully positive utopia. It may have had enough negative things in it to seem ‘real’ to Dream Zanarkand’s inhabitants. Even if it didn’t, and it was an idealised utopia, utopias often have dark sides in fiction, and a grand idea, despite honourable intentions, will slide downwards into a dystopia eventually. Just think about Bioshock’s Rapture and Columbia. Think about Plato’s Atlantis. Etc, etc.

As for ourselves, yes we do not live in a utopia. They don’t exist. We live instead in a world which, as a species, we are never happy with. We always want to change the planet, and we always disagree with other members and communities of our species and conflict with them. If this is a dream, it is not a very good dream.

However, an idealised utopia isn’t the grounded point of the ‘dream’ in philosophy like this, in my understanding anyway. It’s about being conscious not to rely only on your own senses to tell you what is real. Your senses could show you a world which could be good, bad, or convincingly neutral, but your senses could be lying regardless. Thinking is required to put things together and see where things do not add up, and to see (what The Matrix would call) the glitches.

It’s an interesting philosophical exercise, and it can be healthy to use allegories such as Plato’s Cave and indulging fictional stories such as The Matrix, but I think that if we take it to extremes and we are actually worried that we are not truly where we think we are, or who / what we think we are, or when we are, then we’ll likely descend into madness.