John Suler, Ph.D.

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Illusion and Reality at the "Palace" The great Zen master Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he asked himself, "Am I a man who just dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who now dreams about being a man?"

You sit almost motionless, relaxed, your eyes focused on a glowing screen - the only source of light in an otherwise dark room. Your fingers tap lightly as your mind converges on the words and images that float before you. At times it seems like there is no difference between your thoughts and those images. At times it seems the distinction between inner and outer worlds almost disappears. At times, time itself evaporates. You are a computer user immersed in cyberspace. All melts into a new reality that transcends the rules of conventional reality. Like a Zen master in meditation, you have become one with with the virtual universe.

OK... This is not the typical, everyday scenario for the computer user. Most of the time we just hack away at the keyboard to get something done, without slipping into transcendent consciousness. But many experienced computer users can recall moments like this. Cyberspace is indeed an extension of the mind, which means it can extend all facets of mental life - including hypnotic reveries and other altered states of awareness. Under the right conditions, cyberspace becomes a dream world, not unlike the world which emerges when we sink into sleep.

This doesn't mean that these virtual experiences should be dismissed as whimsical mental meanderings with no value or purpose. Quite the contrary. Psychology clearly has established the necessity of nocturnal dreams for maintaining emotional health and promoting personal growth. The same may be true of virtual dreaming. Cyberspace is not simply an "information super-highway," It can offer the human psyche much more than facts. Virtual space can flex the boundaries of conscious and unconscious realities. It can tell us something about the meaning of "real."

In this article I'd like to explore the parallels between cyberspace and altered states of consciousness, especially the states of mind that surface in dreams. Some of these ideas may apply to a variety of environments on the internet, especially MOOs, MUDs, and other virtual "worlds." I will focus specifically on the Palace - a graphical chat environment where people use icons (avatars) to represent themselves while socializing with other users in visual scenes, including indoor rooms and outside settings (see Life at the Palace). While some of the dreamlike qualities of Palace can be found in other virtual worlds, several of its dreamy features are quite unique. Most important of all, the Palace, like dreams, is so captivating because it is a highly visual experience. As the old saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words. Visual experiences are psychologically RICH. Images and symbols are the language of the unconscious.

Facets of Dreaming in Cyberspace

Psychology has mapped out many of the mental components of dreams and other altered states. Psychoanalytic theorists place them under the label of "primary process." Primary process is a style of thinking and experiencing that is quite different than normal waking states of consciousness (called "secondary process"). It defies conventional rules of time, space, and logic. It zooms in on subjective meaning and emotion rather than toeing the line of "objective" or "rational" truth. It's a primordial, magical type of thinking that usually remains unconscious, but can surface to fuel creativity, mysticism, and psychosis. Many of these facets of dream-like primary process can be found at the Palace.

Transcending Physics

In dreams, the conventional rules of space do not apply. The dreamer can rapidly shift from one scenario to another without having to travel any ground. The only sense of "distance" or "place" that has meaning is PSYCHOLOGICAL distance and place. Also, the restrictions of gravity and everyday physics may disappear. One can float, bounce, fly in patterns that would make Newton's eyes cross.

So too in cyberspace the user can transcend the laws of space and physics. One simply has to click on a button to be transported from one location to another. There is no swinging of feet or turning of wheels to confirm that one has moved. It is a change in the visual/psychological context that indicates transportation. In imaginary virtual worlds. a "goto" command magically shuttles the person from one room or location to another. At the Palace, one also can move from place to place by simply clicking on a doorway, a window or a picture on the wall. You immediately transcend visual space, even "pass through walls" and... POOF! You are there, materializing in the room of your choice, as if you just enjoyed the convenience of an Enterprise transporter. The fact that one can click on objects in rooms to trigger this transportation also lends a symbolic magical power to the object, just as objects in dreams wield symbolic power. They are portals to a new place with new meanings. Whenever I click on the rectangular stone monument standing at the center of the "Slabs," I think of the mystical Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Unlike text-only virtual worlds, the highly visual Palace adds the opportunity to violate gravity and physics. Your avatar can float in mid-air, teeter impossibly on the edge of someone's shoulder, hang upside down from the ceiling. Jim Bumgardner, the creator of Palace, wove such gravity-defying features into Palace for both technical and psychological reasons.Simulating real world physics required more programming and system horsepower. Users also disliked the restrictions. "Early attempts by myself to create real world constraints," Bumgardner stated, "such as limiting a person's movement to the floor area of the room, were quickly removed, because they were perceived by myself and the other users as unnecessary obstacles... There is no attempt to mimic real world physics in the Palace. As far as I am concerned, physics basically present obstacles, and I wanted to create a world with few obstacles."

As in dreams, the Palace's suspension of the laws of physics and space satisfies conscious and unconscious fantasies of magic, omnipotence, and defiance. But at times members also take great pleasure in conforming to these laws. With "positional avatars" users do such things as sit themselves into chairs and bathe in the spa pool. They enjoy the option to play with the loose virtual boundary between physical law and improbable movement. It's a marvelous balancing act between the real/mundane and the surreal/magical. Like Merlin, they have the power to use or bend, at will, the laws of nature.

Spontaneous Generation

You can't create something out of nothing.

Well, that principle doesn't hold true in the world of dreams. People and things appear out of nowhere. They change shape and size with little regard for the physical laws of conservation. And when they have served their purpose, they fizzle out and recede into nothing. This feature of spontaneous generation in dreams may be a derivative of how we generally experience the unconscious. Whenever the unconscious manifests itself - as in creative inspiration or psychotic (including drug-induced) experiences - its symbols and sensations just "pop up" from nowhere, as if springing from the head of Zeus. In fact, classic myths, being vehicles for expressing universal patterns of unconscious thought, are filled with examples of spontaneous generation.

Some virtual worlds are based on a token or monetary system. You have to earn or win these tokens in order to use them to create (buy) new objects, rooms, and avatars. It's a world that adheres to the rational laws of economics, materialism, and physics.

The Palace, on the other hand, allows spontaneous generation. New objects (props) can be created out of nothing. To your hearts content, you can duplicate a can of Pepsi, a bouquet of flowers, or Tom Cruise's face over and over again, filling the entire room, if you so wish. With paint brushes, you can draw whatever you like on the rooms. And with the simple incantation "clean" you can sweep all of it away and start anew. There is no cost, no price to pay, no bartering. It's even better than alchemic magic. Like the ability to transcend space and gravity, it creates a feeling of freedom and omnipotence.

Transcending Time

In the unconscious, time is irrelevant. A personal experience dozens of years old may remain as pristine and new as the day it happened. That moment remains frozen in time. In dreams, it may surface in derivative symbols and images that feel as real as real life. The dream may transpose and blend the past, the present, and expectations about the future. Time is not a linear march of static moments, but flexible stuff to be manipulated for the purpose of expressing psychological meaning.

In cyberspace, one's time frame can be suspended, blended with other people's time frames, and, sometimes, even negated.

Despite the fact that Palatians usually complain about lag, it is a fascinating suspension of time. The whole scene freezes before your very eyes. People mostly experience this as a frustrating restriction on their ability to talk and maneuver, not unlike the familiar paralysis nightmares where your legs become sluggish or stuck in mud despite your desperate efforts to run. But in these nightmares your mind may remain active - and in cyberspace lag your mind always remains active. As in a episode from the Twilight Zone, this suspension of the moment may prove to be a unique opportunity. It affords you precious seconds or minutes to decide what you will say or do next. In some situations, that temporal bonus may come in very handy. Don't you sometimes wish you could freeze time in real life?

How we think, feel, and behave is partly determined by the circadian rhythms of our daily routine. How a group thinks, feels, and behaves is determined by the collective summing of these individual states of consciousness. You and your peers, for example, are not exactly the same at 8:30 am when you arrive for work as you are at midnight working overtime. The group moods, attitudes, and topics of discussion shift. In cyberspace, people arrive from different time zones. People's "heads" may be in very different places in their circadian cycle. Cyberspace blends these various individual states of consciousness into a collective group-consciousness that transcends time.

Have you ever intended to go online for just 15 minutes or so, but end up being there for hours? People say "I lost track of the time." They become totally absorbed in what they are doing. They become immersed in the moment - an "eternal" space that lies beyond time. This phenomenon is by no means unique to cyberspace. People become absorbed in all sorts of activities - especially creative ones. The common denominator for all these experiences is that people "lose themselves" in the activity. Individual identity yields to the timeless process of "being" - what some psychologists call "B-Cognition." As in dreams, the waking self-conscious ego (the ego locked into time) is forgotten while new dimensions of self express themselves un-self-consciously in the process of simply doing and being.

Loose Self Boundaries

In dreams one doesn't necessarily have to talk to communicate with the other dream characters. Thoughts, feelings, and intentions can be transmitted without speaking, as if the others can read your mind, and you theirs. As a matter of fact, the other characters ARE your own mind, which is why "they" can read it. Even in the waking state, the unconscious mind assumes an almost telepathic connection to other people, which developmentally dates back to early childhood when the baby assumes that parents can detect her thoughts and automatically anticipate her needs. The boundaries between self and other are loose and overlapping. In psychosis, an extreme version of this occurs when a person believes that his thoughts are being broadcasted to others, or that other's thoughts are being inserted into his mind. While this may be pathological, other examples of loose and overlapping self-boundaries are not. Empathy relies on the ability to extend one's own awareness into the zone of the other's experience. It's a blending of self and other. It's what the baby expects and needs from his parents. It's what everyone needs in order to develop psychologically and maintain a sense of emotional well-being. Our culture's fascination with ESP and science fiction "mind-melds" is partly derived from the (unconscious) recognition that this potentially empathic blending of self and other is a basic human need.

In chat and MOO environments on the internet, one usually has the ability to secretly communicate with others while in the presence of a group of users. At the Palace it's called "whispering." Palatians also can secretly communicate with people in OTHER rooms through what is called, not surprisingly, "ESPing."

Whispering and ESPing can feel like a magical telepathic connection to the other, a blending of your mind with the other user. Some people may feel empowered by this special skill (another fulfillment of unconscious wishes for omnipotence). Others may expect the encounter to satisfy that basic human need for empathic support - and may be disappointed, even hurt, if that doesn't happen. Whispering to several people at the same time allows all of them into your mind at once, forcing you to divide your mind up into several separate compartments in order to carry out those distinct conversations. This multiple whispering thus requires your ability to "dissociate" (I'll say more about dissociation later).

The Palace software places the user's typed messages into balloons that pop out of one's head, similar to comic strips. One special type of balloon is the "thought balloon." As in comic strips, dots trail up to the balloon, indicating you are thinking. Essentially, you can "think out loud" - which is reminiscent of the psychotic's thought broadcasting. Thought balloons are a kind of mumbling or "half speak" where a person implicitly is saying, "I'll let you know what I'm thinking, but you don't have to respond if you don't want to, because it's ONLY a thought." It's a relatively safe way of letting down your self-boundaries and allowing people into your head.

When you signed onto Palace, there once was an automated message advising you not to treat Palace simply as a game... that there are REAL PEOPLE at the other end of those avatars. Perhaps some people indeed think of it as a video game, which is why they may act out all sorts of asocial needs on the avatars walking across their screen. But maybe there is more to it than this. Perhaps people tend NOT to think of the other real people behind those avatars because they unconsciously experience all those entities as existing within the boundaries of their own minds. If cyberspace is an extension of one's own intrapsychic world, then those little avatars may be unconsciously experienced as being INSIDE one's head, rather than as external beings with their own needs and feelings. All of us show very little hesitation in acting out all sorts of feelings onto the "people" (what some psychologists describe as "internal representations" of the significant others in our lives) that reside within our fantasy and dreams. In fact, that's the purpose of fantasy and dreams - to give us space to ventilate and (ideally) work through those feelings. When cyberspace is experienced as a blending of our minds with the virtual world, it becomes another arena to act out those feelings. Seducing, fighting, opposing, ignoring, insulting, flattering, exalting, or demeaning those little avatars may all be actions taking place (unconsciously) WITHIN the user's own fantasy world. It's only when the other user says or does something really unexpected that you are nudged, or sometimes jolted, into the realization that there *IS* another real person present - that what you had been experiencing was an unconscious blending of the virtual reality into the boundaries of your own personal reality. It's what psychoanalytic thinkers call "transference."

Identity Shifting (dissociation)

A major attraction of the Palace is the ability to create avatars to represent oneself. At will, users can switch among various icons chosen to reflect their various moods, interests, and personality characteristics. In various ways, this shape-shifting is strikingly similar to dream life. The appearance of people changes from one moment to the next, generating questions about their true motives and identity. Users are thinking and communicating in images rather than language. Often those images are highly symbolic. They are the products of the same mental processes that produce dreams - such as symbolization and the condensation of multiple meanings into one picture. Avatars portray universal human themes and ideas, similar to the dreams expression of archetypes from the collective unconscious (for a more detailed discussion, see The Psychology of Avatars and Graphical Space).

Shape-shifting gives the user some conscious control over the psychological process known as "dissociation." By switching avatars, users are expressing various components of their identity in a disconnected or disassociated fashion. It's something like having a controllable "multiple personality." Although having this ability once again satisfies that unconscious need for omnipotence (as one user said, "What could be more powerful than a shape-shifter?"), users are not always fully conscious of exactly what they are expressing about their personality via their avatars. It's the same for the dreamer. Every visual element in the dream may be a representation of some aspect of the dreamer's identity. Each character and object in the dream is a split off or dissociated component of the self - but the dreamer is not fully aware of this. At the Palace, even OTHER people's avatars become a target for projecting and expressing aspects of YOURSELF. As I described earlier, there is at times a tendency to react to other people's avatars not as an extension of their personality, but as an extension of your own thoughts and feelings (representations) about important people in your life.

Dissociation is a common phenomena in cyberspace at large. It is a well-known fact that people use the internet to express and experiment with various aspects of their identity. Some people deliberately create a specific online personality for themselves. They have some conscious control over the same kind of wish fulfillment that fuels dreams. A very lively discussion on the Palace User Group mailing list once focused on whether people have an "online" versus "real life" personality. People argued over whether this meant they were suffering from schizophrenia or a "split personality".... For most people, it's definitely NOT schizophrenia, but it IS a splitting of identity between what one usually presents to others in the physical world and what one likes to create in the cyberworld. One is not necessarily less "real" than the other. All are aspects of one's identity, although some may be hidden or unconscious aspects.

A woman consistently referred to one of her online companions as "she" when she spoke about this companion in cyberspace, and as "he" when she spoke about being with this companion in real life. Both were equally real to her. Carl Jung, a pioneer of dream interpretation, might be pleased to see that many people use cyberspace to experiment, in this somewhat dissociated fashion, the male and female components of their personality - the "anima" and "animus." For example, online gender-switching is a fairly common practice.

It's very possible that, for some cybernauts, the experimenting with alternate personalities eventually UNDOES dissociation because they begin to understand, accept, and integrate those alternate personalities into their conscious sense of self. Likewise, self-integration is the goal of many clinical approaches to exploring the various facets of one's personality that surface in dreams.

The ultimate act of dissociation is to disappear - to eliminate your own manifestation - while still remaining conscious. Lurkers know this feeling well. At the Palace, some users attempt to reduce their avatar to a single pixel and their name to a single character in order to achieve invisibility. It's like a dream in which the dreamer is only consciously, but not "physically," present in the scene. One wishes to observe the action, to take it all in, to perhaps secretly inject some influence - but without owning responsibility for any of it. It's not unlike claiming that your dream is "JUST a dream" - thereby disowning and distancing yourself from it. At the Palace, users have the ability to throw their voice by placing their text balloon in mid-air or next to someone else's avatar ("spoofing"), rather than allowing it to emanate from their own avatar. They can also blot out their name from the supplemental text log of the ongoing conversation, so there is no evidence whatsoever of their having made a comment. It's not invisibility, but it indeed is the same attempt to dissociate and disown from yourself some thought or feeling you can't stop yourself from expressing.

Tags: Internet Psychology

About the Author

John Suler, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Rider University. This article comes from his online hypertext book The Psychology of Cyberspace which describes his ongoing research on how individuals and groups behave in cyberspace. His work has been reported by national and international media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, and CNN. www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/