| Almost every member of the crew wakes up after experiencing a nightmare of some sort that included the same alien. However, some, including Kim, don't awake, and are instead trapped in a dream world. After scans do not reveal any sort of nearby alien presence, Chakotay volunteers to attempt to fall asleep and negotiate, since he has some experience with lucid dreaming - the practice to using cues to alert the dreamer that he is in a dream so that he or she can take control of the action. He at first appears to be successful, but after the aliens seem to have led the crew into a trap and captured the ship, he sees his visual cue reflected in a screen and manages to wake himself up. The Doctor informs him that after he fell asleep, the rest of the crew followed suit and are trapped in a shared dream, and now they are the only two left. They track the aliens, who live in a sleep state (which they consider to be as real as the waking world) to a planet where there are piles of them asleep in a cave. He orders the Doctor to fire a torpedo at the cavern if he does not hear back from Chakotay in the next five minutes, then falls asleep and uses that threat to free the rest of the crew. |
Several years ago, I read an interesting sci-fi book for which lucid and shared dreaming were central to the premise (Dreamside, 1991). The act of controlling one's dreams is a real thing that happens - I myself have had a number dreams that qualify, and though I've never really entered such a dream intentionally, it sounds like it is a doable thing. Now, to have a shared lucid dream requires sci-fi conceits such as telepathy, but I think that we're all on board for that if we're watching Star Trek.
The dreams that open the episode feel like a missed opportunity after season 2's Persistence of Vision, an episode that wasn't exactly perfectly executed, and is marred by the presence of the gothic holoprogram, but I keep thinking back to as a good example of sneaky character development (even if some of that development was out of the blue and never used again - see for example the lack of a Chakotay/Torres romance anywhere else in the series). The dreams here could have been a chance to explore unspoken motives and desires but they fall short here. Tuvok has a very bland "walking naked onto the bridge dream"; Paris, who is still begging for more development, has a nightmare about crashing a shuttle, defining himself completely by his role on the ship; Kim dreams about making out with Seven, and it only becomes a nightmare when she turns out to be a male alien, which I guess develops him as being homophobic; and Janeway dreams that she's failed at bringing everyone home before they've died of old age, which is a personal dream, but nothing we haven't heard her worrying about before.
Still, all that is compacted into the episode's teaser. The rest of the episode has all the interesting lucid dreaming stuff and trippy back-and-forth with the dream-world. I'm disappointed that Tuvok doesn't have any resistance to this telepathic dream attack either (he was just as susceptible in Persistence of Vision, and I was disappointed there too), with all of his Vulcan mental discipline. That part was just annoying, but I think I may have had a seizure at the terrible lampshading moment between Janeway and Chakotay. He brings up the very reasonable question of how a species could evolve when it spends all of its time in the dreamword [instead of being awake and sexing] - she replies, with a smug smile, that they may never find out - like we don't know why some aliens have cartilaginous appendages sealing their mouths shut, or why pure telepaths even have vocal cords that they know how to use. It is one thing to make cool and interesting aliens that probably wouldn't work in the real world, and it is another to then call attention to their implausibility for a cheap in-joke.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: Missed opportunities scar this otherwise fun sci-fi adventure episode.
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