Final Project: The Room

For my final project, a short story, I explored the idea of shifting realities and the potential for a variety of realities in what is perceived as one reality. The story is based off of a couple of different people I ran into in the nursing homes in which my great-grandmother and grandfather lived. One woman was convinced she was a cruise boat director. Another man appeared to be the sweetest old man and, before his illness set in, was just that, however, when approached would do nothing but yell obscenities at people. for a while I was struggling with my own grandfather's rapidly progressing dementia due to Parkinson's and realized that many times these men and women, though they appear to be in the room we're in, are in a completely different world that we cannot access. Who are we to say that our world is more real than the one we're experiencing just because it happens to be the one we are experiencing. To me, it's kind of like the "real" level in Avalon, where reality is never something static, defined or even definable. How are we to know that we aren't hallucinating our whole lives? That we aren't the ones sitting almost comatose in nursing room armchairs staring at the wall? It sounds melodramatic, but to me it still poses a valid question, that is only fitting since we have spent so much of the semester discussing what constitutes reality versus non-reality and how able we are to really decide that. I've come to the conclusion that reality, since it can only be measured by our perception of it, is something incredibly unstable and indefinable. Also, since it is a concept based on perception, it is always variable, depending on whose reality is being presented.