Play Dead
Play Dead
By: Ted Dekker
“In a way, everything’s an illusion, because we can’t see it for what it really is.”
I’ve been a bit critical of Ted Dekker’s most recent books. I was pleased that this one is more reminiscent of his earlier works.
This is The Matrix and Ready Player One meets The Truman Show meets a spiritual allegory.
What is reality?
I would say this book has three facets:
The first is the suspense/thriller storyline of two murdered teenagers in a world where VR is much more advanced and dangerous. A writer tasked with exposing the dangers of VR works with an ‘old-school’ cop to find the killer and discover what dangerous information the teenagers had discovered. Their investigation puts a target on their backs from the big and influential players in the game with a lot at stake and the means to eliminate them.
The second is a critique of VR technology in general. Dekker uses the writer character, Angie Channing’s, beliefs to cause us, as readers, to think critically about this now-developing technology. It reminded me of the book I read called The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World which focuses a lot on VR and other technology. While I felt the author in that book presented pretty biased information, if you are interested in research regarding the sociology of technology, you may find parts of it worth reading. Similarly, Dekker explores the implications of VR and how it could influence our perceptions and beliefs and how that would impact the world. More on that later.
The third is the spiritual allegory that would make a really interesting book club discussion. I went back and forth on what I thought he was trying to imply. But overall I interpreted it as the depiction of how we are dead in our sins and believe lies about who we are and our purpose in the world, but when our eyes are opened to the truth our perception changes and we are enlightened to our true identity in Christ and recognize the idols we were holding onto— a false reality. A rebirth.
So I would classify this as suspense/thriller, science fiction, and Christian fiction all wrapped into one.
Some of my critiques of his most recent books (like The 49th Mystic or The Girl Behind the Red Rope) were due to my dislike of the abstract allegorical writing and mystical ‘teachings’ the characters used that detracted from the main plotline. I think in Play Dead Dekker did a much better job of staying on task. While some of it became a bit cerebral, it was less of a spiritual/mysticism and more of a scientific/spiritual consideration of how perception and reality work together to form our beliefs. It was more science-fictiony than preachy so I appreciated that shift in his writing.
Dekker is definitely in touch with today’s culture and I found some of the comments his characters make in the book quite interesting and worth pondering:
“You can’t regulate morality.”
“Society couldn’t seem to help but categorize people. Worse yet, politicians never failed to pit one group against another. Ultimately, categorizing people was the deepest of humanity’s evils.”
“Politics. Was there no end to the thirst for power and control masquerading as society’s salvation?”
“Stem cells become what they are ‘taught’ to become based on external information fed to them. On a fundamental level, we are all what we’ve been taught to believe.”
“Our bodies, our relationships, our lives. We’re terrified of losing those things because we think they make us who we are. Fear of loss keeps it all in place. Dying means letting go of all of it, our entire life in the world, to know ourselves beyond the images and relationships apparent in this world.”
“A butterfly on the wings of love in the world of caterpillars crawling through fear.”
“Fear was False Evidence Appearing Real”
Like mentioned earlier, I think there are a lot of aspects about this book that would make for fun discussion so in that way, I would highly recommend this book as a book club read!
Do I agree with all the ‘beliefs’ he is suggesting? I don’t think so, but there is some abstractness to his allegory that makes a full interpretation probably impossible.
He says that reality is static and if we change our beliefs we can change reality. He gave the example of a mouse in a VR system that made the mouse believe he had longer legs and then because of that changed perception in his mind he began to grow longer legs. Is this example real?? I have no idea, but (at a short glance) there is research that shows changing perceptions in our brain can change our DNA in certain ways.
So in some ways our beliefs can change certain realities (small r), but I think Reality (big r) is the same whether we perceive it differently or not. There are certain objective truths that do not change. God is unchanging even if our perception changes. It doesn’t change who God is, it changes how we view Him. This can become a bit of a trippy line of thought.
He also says, “All suffering was fashioned from the same fabric: fear and shame rooted in illusion and lies, beginning with the lie that there was something wrong with them.” This relationship between fear and love is a common Dekker theme. ‘Sin’ isn’t a common term in books so I understand how using ‘fear’ as a substitute is better received— if that’s what he’s actually doing. I guess I could agree with the idea that all suffering is a result of sin— directly and indirectly (in the sense of The Fall).
But the phrase ‘the lie that there was something wrong with them’ gives me pause. Biblically speaking, there is something wrong with us— we are inherently sinful. Sinners, dead in our sin and needing a Savior. God created humanity and it was good, but sin has corrupted us. So in that sense, yes, there is something wrong with us. Is that our identity? No. So the lie is believing that we are stuck in our ‘wrongness’ as irredeemable. The ‘wrong’ we experience has been died for, forgiven, and redeemed if we trust in Him who died for us.
Some ponderings on this whole perception vs reality thing. I was getting vibes in this book that much of life is meaningless once you are enlightened to Reality. That you are ‘free’ from things. I agree with freedom, but just because we realize that our best is yet to come when Jesus returns with the new Heaven and Earth, it doesn’t mean we can treat this Reality as inconsequential.
With the concept of VR, there is debate about the body because of the perceptions of the mind. Is our soul and mind our “true selves” and the body simply a casing or mode of transportation? I think the Bible is clear that our bodies are important and they matter. What we do with our bodies matters. (See What God Has to Say about Our Bodies for an interesting crossover and companion book to a mind/body/identity discussion).
Whatever perceptions we change about our identity, we can’t view escape from the body as a goal. We should not view the body as a constraint. It diminishes the creation of God in the first. The Bible tells us God created us on purpose with a purpose so any concept that is changing our perception to mean our minds are of utmost and sole value, we have rejected God’s created design.
VR comes with opportunities to change our identity or appearance and I would argue that that is also a dangerous road that could be seen as rejecting God’s design for his purposed creation. Physical boundaries and limitations are good for us.
If you reread the quote I put at the top of this review, we could consider its implications. An illusion is a false belief. Because we may not perceive everything in its fullness, does it make the belief false? Or just incomplete? If everything is false because we can’t know it perfectly, how can we ever know truth? Why would God create us to never perceive truth? It can’t be.
There is truth and we can perceive it.
But to Dekker’s creative and intellectual mind, these discussions are fun and interesting and still relevant to faith. There are lies and actual illusions holding us back from our true identities and if the veil is removed from our eyes, the world and reality we are in will be seen with clarity and truth and a new perception about our lives and our purpose.
I love this book for its suspense (a Dekker trademark), it’s critique of VR (I’m a curmudgeon who recognizes that the world never learns from books and movies that lay out the clear and present danger of technology and we just wait 10-20 more years and proceed with said dangerous tech because it’s more accepted and humanity only cares about ‘progress’), and its discussion potential of perception, reality, truth, and identity.
Grab this book, read it with your friends, and talk yourselves in mind-bending circles!
Bonus points if you can explain infinite fractal geometry to me like I’m 5.
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