The Lucid Dream: On Comas, Multiple Personalities, Self-Cutting and Higher Dimensions (an attempt at a grand unified theory of The OA) Part 2
Odds and Ends
-Scott's rag looks like an angel wing. It doesn't shift positions when he sits down and gets up. Is Prairie's age represented accurately?
"In a dream you are never eighty." ~Anne Sexton
-[Ep. 1 -14:34] Steve laughs when she says what year she was born. Prairie gives him the look of "Come on, you said you'd pretend to believe me"
-The phone in the boarding school she's supposedly talking to her parents on is antique.
-How can you tell you're in a dream? In therapy Elias suggests that she may be in another juncture right now. In a way, he could be suggesting to her she's in another dream.
-Claude, MI where Prairie was supposedly last seen is one of the very few (or only?) fictitious locations in the entire show. The name Claude means lame/crippled.
-One of the tricks to figuring out if you're in a dream is to train yourself to at look text or some detail and look back and see if it changes. In dreams, these details don't stay consistent. This is one of the interpretations of why there are intentional continuity errors.
-The above is one of the ways you can learn to Lucid Dream. Think lucid dreaming doesn't have anything to do with this? http://x.co/6lq5p
-When you're thinking about a coma, the food pellet dispenser looks oddly like an IV.
-Abel's reference to "climbing a tree" I believe is an allusion to the forking paths/time themes.
-Using the numerology key here , I've decoded a ton of the numbers in the series. So far it really hasn't helped explain unknown things, rather it illustrates what we're watching, or what we'll see later in the series, but it is definitely a thing. I'd suggest the powerful/powerless tags be removed in favor of just male/female because that seems to work better.
-I can't find the scene for the life of me but there is a scene where Nancy gives adult Prairie meds and it doesn't look like she takes them. Also this, from the instragram
-There is a book about Abraham Lincoln that references OA as Overcoming Adversity. Probably not related, but coincidentally very appropriate.
-BBA says she stuck her neck out for Steve and here, which is right after the sandwich scene [Ep. 3 -46:14]. BBA is wearing the same clothes in this scene [Ep. 7 -20:24] and references shes eating a sandwich.
-Renata adding to the alter theory.
-Trains are thematically linked to the shifting time/space. Finding spots where train noises exist and can be seen is handy. Also a train is an important component in the Garden of Forking Paths short story.
-Can't find specifically where just now but there's several out of place sneezing bits in the show. Sneezing has some spiritual connections and new age connections
-Scott mentions Mousetrap. Mousetrap is a game where 5 players first cooperate to build a Rube Goldberg (overly complex) mousetrap, and then turn on each other. 5 players, and in the end Prairie ran off with the cheese.
Needs further insight
There have been other posts about some of these but in the context of the above:
-What is Nancy saying here? The only other references to smell I recall are when Jaye tells Steve he smells good, and Steve references it again later in the car with her.
-What's with the flossing? Hap and Prairie both floss (this may be a way to connect them, but then lots of people floss) and Abel is reading an issue of Mental Floss whilst in the therapy waiting area. Flossing could be a hint to connect cycles.
-Do the shifting seasons mean anything?
-What is the significance of the dust mentions. Could is just be connecting parts of the cycles?
-Brit and Zal talked a lot about "the math" of the show. This is not very well solved. There's an equation early on that isn't solved. It has no traditional solution, but I'm very sure there is some solution possible once other parts of the show are solved. There's some irrational numbers indicated. There is a tattoo that just appears of a cube on a guys chest- Before Later, when Hap remembers it [Ep. 5 -44:59] and a post that talks about it. There are numerous graphs around link link. There is extensive numerology link link(which by the way foreshadows themes that the scene or story shows really well). But what's up with the math? [Reminder to self to work on sound code bit]
-How does BBAs interest in containers fit into this?
-Who is Byron [Ep. 7 -19:26]? Normally I would write this off to superfulous fluff but the writing is so dense I have to think this will be a future character, or be meaningful in some other way.
-What about the other posters and graphs in the series?
-What does Saturn have to do with this? In Astrology Saturn is connected with the 5th dimension, but I think there is more to this in the context of everything above.
-Was there ever a real Cuba? If they're all alters, was the sex scene two alters connecting, or more likely was there some real sex scene in the past, and this was just the coma/dream state representation of that real event? My belief is there was a real Cuba because it is represented so vividly and accurately, but what we're seeing is a dream/coma state representation of that real memory. When or what the real memory could be I have no idea.
-Why is BBA so purple? She's consistently the most purple of any of the characters. This leads me to believe shes based the least in a real memory. At least she must not have been a teacher, at most she didn't exist at all and is just an amalgam of other characters/memories/events.
-I started a project to collect all the clothes everyone is wearing to match them to the different scenes in the show, but between this post and the rest it proved to be overwhelming. I think it might be a way to connect disconnected pieces of the story/cycles though if someone wants to pick that up.
-What do BBA's otters have to do with anything?
-What does Homer's ring have to do with anything?
-When is she blind exactly? She blinks in this scene when the flash goes off [Ep. 2 -43:48]. There have been cases where one personality in a multiple personality person is blind, but others are not.
-What does Buck's closed door represent?
My pure speculation of what really happened
She (Prairie or Rachel) had a broken home. Her mom committed suicide when she was very young. Her dad was a drug dealer or other criminal low-life type. He got locked up and she was scooped up by some degenerate that sold her to another sicko(Abel). She was probably sold alongside another child that became like her brother.
In captivity she started developing MPD and self-cutting. She managed to steal Abel's van and run away with her brother. She didn't know how to drive very well and got into a horrible accident. This is when she had her first NDE. Her brother may have died or been injured and died later due to drug-abuse after being taken in to protective custody after the accident (Rachel vs BBA brother endings).
The authorities charged Abel and that's when all the commotion with the media was going on. He made a plea and denied everything, maybe even claiming she was his daughter and it wasn't an abduction. She eventually revisited her old house (as French alter).
The toll of the abduction and the loss of her brother was too much for her fragile mental state to bear. She ended up in a mental institution, where she met Elias, her therapist. She had a fallout with one of her main alters (Leon or maybe Hap) and she lost it, but she wasn't considered a threat to herself or others so the institution was forced to allow her to leave when she asked to be let go.
In her badly fractured state, wanting to get her other alters back, she jumped from a bridge. She suffered from hypothermia, a severe head injury, and had her second NDE.
We pickup with her in a coma, cared for by Dr. Homer Roberts. We see the above events as both real memories, interpreted memories (through the dream-lens), fabricated/idealized situations (her childhood with Abel and "Nancy"), and real-world events that she can hear that integrate into her dream state (like the drowning NDE machine which I interpret to be a shower or water therapy-see above).
The Crestwood 5 are probably real people she met in her journeys that are now dream-characters helping her get out of her coma or locked in state.
Her NDEs have given her abilities above other humans that she'll be able to use both to get out of her current situation and into the future. Long since physically healed of her injuries, the show ends with her managing to get back to consciousness from her coma/locked in state, armed with her new found abilities.
Predictions for the future
I think in the next series we'll meet the real people the Crestwood 5 are based off of. Also I think the show will morph into an exploration of time/multidimensional travel and exploring different time lines and possibilities. Not a typical time travel show though (that only occurs in the 4th dimension), I think the show is going to try to explore higher dimensions, at least up to the 6th dimension (kind of like the show Sliders).
Attribution: u/amysteriousmystery u/FadingSkullz u/Spacegrl14 u/ApplePieTerrorist u/BerlinghoffRasmussen u/markg87321 u/Dr_Oxen_La_Plug u/Closedown11 u/kookaburralaughs u/Jacksoncari u/dflat666 u/Angedanobx u/bananagum75 u/BustnIt u/DorkyUdon
The above are the OPs I linked to in this post, but many others contributed to my thinking, not to mention numerous comments from many others.
TL;DR: Prairie has multiple personalities (the real host of which may be Rachel). She developed this under abuse, probably by Abel. She's a self-cutter. She jumped off a bridge and took a head injury leading to a coma or locked in state. Most of the characters we see are alters of Prairie or fictionalized memories of real people she knew. She's trying to make her way back to consciousness. She had 2 real NDEs, and in having them gained some ability to experience higher dimensions. End TL;DR
Posted Mar 19, 2017, 11:56 PM UTC · edited
Sorry I'm commenting with little things here and there... But with the dreaming theory.. I have something to add..
Dreams don't make your nosebleed from OA Instagram...
Episode 3 Prairie checking to see if her nose is bleeding right before she shows Homer the ring and the envelope.
Just thought it was worth mentioning, we never see her with or hear of a nosebleed the whole time she is in Haps basement.
How do you interpret this?
I haven't made a conclusive decision yet, but I think it gives evidence to either:
a. When her nose bleeds, its a testament to an awake state as opposed to a sleep or active death state (or vice versa)
or
b. She is simply checking to see if what happened upstairs (finding Homers ring, finding August's body in the tub, Hap almost dying of anaphylactic shock ) was in fact real, she may have felt overwhelmed, the events that took place where surreal.
If B, it lends weight to, but not conclusion to A, in that Prairie has a method of checking for when she is dreaming/alive or in reality/waking life. I just don't think this one time we see her checking her nose to see if its bleeding is enough to conclude the meaning for the rest of the show. I think it's an added support to the idea she struggles with knowing which of her experiences is reality, and we probably should too.