"Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?"
Halfway through the film, the audience finds out that it has been living in the "reality" of Nash's mind. Key players were merely figments of his imagination, and all his time and efforts had been spent on a secret mission he had formulated himself. Nash was lucky to be able to recognise his own condition, and the end of the film shows him humorously checking that others can see a stranger before talking to him.
This led me to wonder if any part of my life was imagined reality. I applied the measure that Nash had learned to use, and was initially relieved that everyone I knew was recognised by someone else.
Then, another thought crossed my mind - what if both the recogniser and the recognised were part of my fantasies? What if I had created an entire network of people around me, so as to assure myself that everything was real? How could I be sure that my entire life thus far had actually occurred?
I soon realised that I couldn't be sure. But that doesn't matter. What is reality anyway? Nash's mental reality was unacceptable because they conflicted with the dominant reality, on which the wider part of his life was based. If the two didn't contradict, would it be such a problem?
Perhaps I'm not advocating the best attitude towards the condition of schizophrenia. But if I'm currently living in the first half of my life film, I hope the bubble never bursts.
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