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In Walden, Thoreau describes how in his imagination he bought several farms, although in reality he never owned any at all. He explains how he worked so hard to imagine landscapes, buildings and harvests that he was able to fantasise entire sagas of negotiation, purchase and sale. Even without money or legal ownership of a piece of land he still ‘annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow’. In other words, his ability to simply savour a landscape enabled him to reap a valuable harvest – the sheer imagined experience of it. ‘I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.’ (1) If it existed in his brain, it was real.
Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we all have been and indeed where we will all end up. After all, what could be more virtual than the unvisited and yet fully imagined place we call Heaven? But let us define our terms. Maybe you’re thinking of people wearing gloves and goggles and navigating their way across an apparently empty room? Well, that’s not the kind of VR I’m talking about.
I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions.
I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.
(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76.
