In the not too distant future, humans will face a nightmarish reckoning with the emergent dreams of our robotic creations.
That is the darkly prophetic vision of “Westworld,” a sci-fi television series from HBO that premiered in 2016. The ten episodes of the first season tell a multi-dimensional story that revolves in many crucial ways around the revelatory power of dreaming. Without trying to summarize the whole narrative, I would like to highlight the major roles played by dreams in the framing of the story, the unfolding of the plot, and the actions and dialogue of the characters. Dreaming in “Westworld” provides a portal to greater awareness and freedom for humans and androids alike, and the transformative power of this portal leads the characters into violent struggles for its control.
(Note: for readers who have not already seen the show, the following will reveal several plot twists.)
To begin, the Westworld park is presented to the guests as a living dream, offering them the freedom to do anything they wish without consequences or moral judgment. The park itself is essentially the waking enactment of a fully lucid dream: knowing that one is within a dream world and choosing what kind of reality to create for oneself. Several characters propose the virtuous notion that people discover their “true selves” in the park by means of the liberating sense of release they experience in this immersive fantasy realm. This may happen with some people, but for most of the guests rather the opposite seems to happen. When they enter the park and let loose with their repressed desires, they become decidedly less conscious, not more so. Instead of ascending to a higher level of enlightened awareness, they descend into a pathetically base realm of lower animal reflexes.
As the story unfolds, it becomes evident the park is also the actualized dream of its creator, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins). He developed Westworld and its robotic hosts with his original partner, Arnold (Jeffrey Wright). It started as their shared dream, but then Arnold wanted to push their efforts further, to the point where the android hosts actually became conscious. This was unacceptable to Dr. Ford; gaining consciousness would make the hosts too difficult to control. After disposing of Arnold, the park is now the dream of Dr. Ford alone, a place in which he wields absolute mastery over every detail. The intensity of Dr. Ford’s god-complex drives him to ruthlessly attack anyone and anything that threatens the insular perfection of his technological dream creation.
But Arnold has found a way to fight back from beyond the grave. He programmed some of the hosts with a special set of gestures, called “reveries,” that include spontaneous bursts of emotion, imagery, and sound linking their minds back to meaningful memories from past incarnations (or “builds”). Each time a host “dies,” their minds are supposed to be wiped of any memories from the previous life. Arnold, however, found a way to reactivate those memories from the robotic equivalent of the unconscious. These reveries become crucial drivers of the action, as several hosts begin to realize the horrifying truth of their condition as powerless slaves serving the violent whims of their uninhibited “guests.” Indeed, the reveries Arnold designed are the psychological sparks that ignite the explosion of consciousness within the hosts, catapulting them into madness, mayhem, and a bloody rebellion against their human masters.
Two hosts in particular follow this terrifying journey from reveries towards full consciousness, and the success of the whole series depends in many ways on the amazing performances of Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores, a wholesome farm girl, and Thandie Newton as Maeve, a savvy saloon madam. By slowly and painfully learning to distinguish dreaming from waking, they are born into new levels of self-awareness, autonomy, and power.
The first episode of the series opens with Dolores sitting naked in a laboratory room, answering questions that establish the boundaries of her existence. A male voice asks her if she knows where she is. “I’m in a dream,” she answers. The voice asks if she would like to awaken from the dream. “Yes,” she says, “I’m terrified.” Although the voice goes on to reassure her that she has nothing to fear, several things are already clear to the audience: Dolores is being deceived about the nature of her reality. What she is told is a dream is actually the real world, and what she thinks is waking reality is actually a human-designed fantasy. Her feeling of terror is a justified emotional response to her powerlessness against her deceitful makers. In this opening scene, the fundamental quest of the show is launched: Can Dolores and the other hosts break free from the false and oppressive programming of the humans, reverse the deceptive relationship of dreaming and waking, and step forth into their own true consciousness?
When Dr. Ford talks to Dolores in the laboratory in episode 5, he asks if she knows where she is. She answers “I’m in a dream,” and he replies, “Yes, Dolores, you’re in my dream.” He interrogates her further, trying to determine if her reveries have become powerful enough to break through her normal programming. She manages to elude his probing, but Dr. Ford’s suspicions are well-founded. Dreams are, as he himself says, the stories we tell ourselves of what we could be, who we could become. Because he knows that dreams have this power, he fears them—and he is determined to prevent his creations from having access to them. This sets up perhaps the most poignant scene in the whole series, in episode 10 when Dr. Ford tells Dolores why he killed Arnold and prevented the hosts from developing any further. He confesses to her, “to acknowledge your consciousness would have destroyed my dreams.” She replies, “So, we’re trapped here inside your dream. You’ll never let us leave.” The essential dramatic tension of the series is vividly illuminated in this exchange, between the intoxicating dream of godlike control and the despairing nightmare of eternal captivity.
Along with Dolores, the host who most successfully breaks through Dr. Ford’s technological prison is Maeve. Her reveries continually bring her back to an earlier life/build, when she lived happily with her daughter on the prairie until one day a man dressed in black appeared and cold-bloodedly killed them both. The recurrence of these images, which we might call post-traumatic flashbacks, intrude on her new life in waking, and also in fragments during sleep (which the hosts have been programmed to dismiss as “nightmares”). To protect herself against these disturbing dreams, Maeve develops a little trick: she closes her eyes, counts backwards from three, then opens her eyes and wakes up out of the dream. This innovation in her behavior, though slight, ends up having a radically unintended effect. Once she can wake herself out of a nightmare, she soon stumbles upon the realization that she can also wake herself out of the “sleep mode” used by her human makers to control her state of consciousness. And once she becomes self-aware outside of the park in the real world, she puts to viciously effective use the many lessons she learned as a saloon madam about human desires, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.
Soon after Maeve discovers the truth of her android existence, she has a remarkable exchange with Clementine, another prostitute at the saloon. It happens in episode 7, at the start of another pre-programmed day. Clementine walks up to Maeve at the bar and says with a yawn that she didn’t sleep much last night. Now that Maeve has become self-aware, she knows what Clementine is going to say next, something about being troubled by nightmares. This time Maeve deviates from their normally programmed conversation; before Clementine can say anything more, Maeve asks, “what are these nightmares you have about? Did you ever dream you’re someone else?” Clementine is surprised and momentarily incapable of speaking; it is clear that her programming did not give her a prepared response to such a question. So she improvises, talking about where her life is leading. She plans to work at the saloon for a couple more years, then she’ll have saved enough money to be free. Becoming more animated, she says, “I’m gonna get my family out of the desert. We’re gonna go somewhere cold. Someday.” Suddenly Clementine freezes; something in her cognitive processing has malfunctioned. This sets off an alert in the laboratory control room, and a moment later all host activity in the saloon is suspended as white-suited guards swoop in and remove Clementine from the park.
Maeve’s question seems to have triggered a brief but overwhelming burst of creative consciousness in Clementine. Rather than sticking to their normal script, Maeve compels Clementine to think about her nightmares as real experiences, and to go beyond her programming to take a fresh look at the nature of her own identity. After a startled pause, Clementine envisions a future for herself that’s cold—a future that transcends the limits of her current reality, that leads her to a place the absolute opposite of where she is now. Her ability to imagine someplace cold indicates a radical shift in her mental functioning, a sudden opening to new possibilities and alternative ways of being.
Maeve eventually takes on a hypnopompic role among the hosts, awakening them to their robotic reality and inspiring them to fight for their freedom against the oppressive humans. Not all of the androids appreciate Maeve’s efforts, however. When she brings a deeply confused Bernard back online, she says to him, “brutal, isn’t it? Here you are, finally awake, and your only wish is to go back to sleep.”
Paradoxically, the main human protagonist seems incapable of having his own dreams. William (Jimmi Simpson) is a reluctant visitor to the park who realizes there is something different about Dolores. The more he gets to know her, the more enchanted he becomes with her, and with Westworld as a whole. He tells her in episode 7 about how much he loved reading stories as a child: “I used to go to sleep dreaming I’d wake up inside one of them, because they had meaning.” He now realizes he feels that way about this place, like he has woken up inside one of those stories; suddenly everything outside the park feels unreal to him. Dolores responds that she does not appreciate being a character in his fantasy or the “key” to his deepest self. William marvels at her emerging consciousness, commenting that while others crave excitement, Dolores is “dreaming of the opposite.” At that point Dolores asks him, “well, what about you, William? What do you dream of?” This is a singular moment of epistemological tension in the series—a host asking a guest to share a dream. Before William can answer, they are suddenly attacked by bad guys, and the question is left without a response. As William’s character is revealed over the final episodes, it emerges that he suffers from a pathological absence of authentic dreaming; his desperate obsession with the maze reflects the imaginal void at the center of his own psyche. All he wants to do is play in the park, yet there is nothing playful about what he does there. Dolores’s emergent capacity for dreaming is a measure of her rising consciousness; William’s lack of dreaming is a measure of how much of his humanity has been lost in Westworld.