Warning: spoilers ahead.
This is a post-book reading guide.
Opposite World is a literary psychological thriller about a woman’s addiction to a virtual reality sleep program that distorts memory and reality.
Beneath this premise are themes of addiction, memory manipulation, parentification, and the struggle to find one’s own voice. The narrative is nonlinear, with glitch-soaked scenes that reveal themselves slowly. The structure is unconventional. Psychotherapy concepts run wild. There’s a subconscious memory-sucking dragon that feeds on pain…
SO…I wanted to create a guide that unpacks what’s happening and makes room for some (hopefully) meaningful conversations.
Here you’ll find a little bit of neuroscience, a splash of therapy concepts, and my personal inspirations. Let’s go!
1. Glitchy Memory Scenes (Welcome to Your Unreliable Brain)
Neuroscience shows that memories are not files we “retrieve.” They’re more like unfinished paintings. Each time we recall a memory, we’re recreating it based on new emotions and information. Imagine adding new strokes and colors to a painting based on what’s available in your current-day palette.
Check out this article from The Glasgow Insight into Science and Technology. It compares memory to a pencil line traced again and again. Some strokes make the line stronger, while other strokes veer off course, distorting the original path.
So don’t get too bent out of shape if you can’t remember something clearly—just redraw it in your mind! Your brain was going to anyway 🙂
This concept is the backbone of Opposite World.
When Pip’s memories are tampered with inside the program, her mind recalibrates those “glitches” as if they were real events. The mind seeks order, not truth, filling gaps with insecurities, fears, and subconscious thoughts. These altered memories seem chronological and true to Pip (and the reader). Yet, we’re actually seeing a preview of something Pip hasn’t consciously discovered yet.
Any glitchy memory scene you face means Pip has already been inside the program. You’re witnessing her mind’s reconstruction of memory glitches. In other words, her mind creates a story to make sense of the damage.
Questions for You
- If you watched your own life like a movie, from beginning to now, would it look the same each time? Or would the film seem different with every play?
- Memories shape who we are. Yet, they can be edited and reshaped over time. Does that mean we’re fully capable of rewiring who we are? Just a simple conversation starter. Keep it handy for when you get stuck in an elevator with someone.
2. Why This Book Gets Weird Halfway Through
The opening of Opposite World is literary, quiet, rooted in nature. This mirrors Pip’s current life in her isolated woods. Once she enters the Reverie Cloud, the book gets stranger, faster, more disorienting. Before, no one knew Pip’s world or interior thoughts; now everyone knows more about her than she knows herself!
As the title’s namesake suggests, I wanted to explore opposites. Nature vs. tech. Quiet vs. noise. Solitude vs. exposure. Like the brain’s two halves, Pip and the book have two halves too.
To Ponder
Think about how you feel depending on your various environments: solitude vs. public, online vs. offline, nature vs. technology.
- Which version feels most like you? Or do they all?
- Did you notice a change in your own life’s speed once technology entered?
3. New Love Sees What It Wants
Despite his importance to Pip, Farley is mostly a background character in early chapters. He’s an outline of someone, the color yet to be filled. This is because we are experiencing him through Pip. She meets him when she’s very young and vulnerable, at a time when she’s looking for connection. Before the Reverie Cloud becomes her escape, Farley is her escape.
She forms a deep bond with him before she has the emotional tools to fully understand him. I didn’t want to show a perfect couple or marriage. I wanted their connection to build. It illustrates that we often make life-altering decisions with people long before we grasp their inner world.
Only later, through the Reverie Cloud, does Pip start to understand Farley as a whole human being. Someone with his own memories and pain. Before this shift, Pip and the reader see Farley as distant, lustful, and unreliable. But inside the program, we see him through his own memories, revealing his private battles. These battles are shaped by a grief Pip never fully grasped. As she grows, she learns to recognize that his flaws come from emotional wounds.
Seeing another person’s pain clearly and choosing compassion highlight Pip’s emotional growth. This is where Farley takes shape and we see his own insecurities, concerns, fears, and desires come through.
What do you think?
It’s easy to mistake familiarity for understanding. Knowing someone is seeing what they do. Understanding them is knowing why they do it. Do you think one naturally leads to the other, or are they separate journeys?
4. The Childhood Art of Adaptation (See also: Parentification 101)
In early years, Pip’s father withholds information from her. Pip pushes for answers at first but soon stops. Her silence reflects emotional parentification—when a child becomes attuned to a caregiver’s emotional fragility and learns not to push or question. Children adapt by staying quiet.
In early adulthood, Pip is annoyed yet still doesn’t push her dad like readers want her to. She sees his withholding not as bad character but as illness. His paranoia is simply a quirk. Only after her journey into repressed memories does she see a full picture. She wrestles with accepting both his love and failures in one package.
This aspect of the book operates on two levels. What seems like a story about a secretive virtual reality program becomes a story on addiction. It focuses on a father’s addiction, which then becomes his daughter’s problem. She becomes like him, inheriting the addiction, but she learns to conquer it.
Ask Yourself
What does it feel like to finally see someone’s full truth?
What does it feel like when you let yourself be fully seen?
5. How to Escape Accountability: A Corporate Guide
Evadere, the original VR sleep program where dreamers explore memories and fantasies in a dream state, was revolutionary. It was designed for healing and self-discovery. Intentions were good, mostly. After co-founder Scarlet Janess died inside the program, everything changed. Victor Janess took over, his greed for power blinding him. The company rebranded as the Reverie Cloud and relocated to Issaquah, Washington. Original founders like Dr. Richard Screed and Dr. Cove Screed left, taking the proprietary codes and blueprints of the very process that killed Scarlet. Evadere’s name, building, and logo changed, but the core technology and its risks remained.
I drew from real life. Look up Blackwater. Look up Facebook. Look up any company that’s dealt with scandal. Escaping problems, whether you’re Pip, Dr. Screed, Andrew, or Evadere, is central to the book.
Reflection Question
What does true accountability look like to you?
6. The Five Dreampaths
Inside The Reverie Cloud, users choose from five Dreampaths
Terra
This Dreampath lets you explore various terrains—dreamy lagoons, breathtaking mountains, dazzling cities. It’s designed as a fun escape, letting users disconnect from stress in an immersive world.
Echo
This is a space for memory processing and imagination. Dreamers can revisit reconstructed moments from their past. They can also interact with likenesses of people they know. When used ethically, this Dreampath functions like exposure therapy. It allows users to process grief, trauma, or unresolved emotions in a controlled environment.
Quest
This Dreampath is full of adventure and fantasy. Here, dreamers tap into a form of play therapy. Dreamers find themselves in enchanted forests, on treasure hunts, exploring magical realms. It’s the most game-like, role-playing Dreampath available.
Restore
This Dreampath is built for somatic relaxation and nervous system regulation. Picture allowing your avatar to experience flowing waters, golden sunsets, and gentle breezes. It’s designed to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting rest, recovery, and peace. Um, sign me up, please!
Openfield
This is a fusion of all Dreampaths—a creative space without boundaries. Here, dreamers can shape their experiences at will. It is a blend of memory, fantasy, and exploration. This path requires the most self-awareness and emotional regulation, as memories become more malleable and risky to explore. Tread carefully and make sure you know who’s managing the Circadian Room while you’re asleep.
Imagine…
Which Dreampath would you pick?
What does that choice reveal about what you’re feeling and seeking right now?
7. The Sword of Choice—Addiction, Agency, and a Metaphorical Weapon
The Sword of Choice is about reclaiming agency. If a dragon (addiction, compulsion, intrusive thoughts) is blowing fire in your face, the sword serves as a coping tool.
Viktor Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
In Pip’s mind, the dragon is an illusory force. It is born from core beliefs and fears developed during childhood—feelings of abandonment, unworthiness, and powerlessness. It feeds on her most painful memories, gaining momentum. The dragon is Pip’s fear made manifest.
I wanted Pip to break free from the dragon and the program’s addictive loop. But it’s only when she recognizes the dragon as her own creation that she can confront it. I wanted her to conquer it through mental growth. I envisioned a mental talisman for her—an anchor point to remind her of her agency. The Sword of Choice.
When Pip mentally accesses the sword, she realizes her power and cuts through the illusion. She’s reminded that even when she feels powerless, she still has agency at her metaphorical hilt.
I use this visualization tool as well. I imagine the Sword of Choice right at my chest, ready to be drawn. It’s always there when I need it—a visual mental anchor I can return to. When I catch myself slipping toward an old coping habit, I picture the sword. I remind myself that only I am in control of my thoughts and actions.
Visualize
Think of a “dragon” in your own life. Would imagining a Sword of Choice help? What other grounding tools are useful to you?
8. When Coping Mechanisms Become Literal Shields
Pip’s father teaches her to calm her mind using comfort carvings—small wooden shapes she can touch and smell. Although she doesn’t remember this, she was once a beta tester for Evadere/Reverie Cloud technology. She experienced terrible side effects as a result: confusion, seizures.
(A playful aside: In a way, all children are like “beta testers” for their parents’ dreams of building a family. When a new life begins, everyone involved is navigating a new program without a manual. As a parent, I think about the metaphorical “Dreampaths” or “memory rooms” I’m creating with my child and how they might be affected by them).
For Pip, those comfort carvings became the one thing that always brought her back to center.
Later, her father returns to comfort carvings when he grows increasingly distrustful of his old colleagues. He wants Pip prepared should she be launched back into the program against her will. But she doesn’t use his carvings to ground herself. Instead, she uses the memory of them to “conjure” a protective wall against the dragon’s heat inside the program.
Around the time I was writing these chapters, I was playing Minecraft with my son. The way Minecraft lets you materialize blocks out of nothing inspired the idea of “conjuring” in the Reverie Cloud. In the Reverie Cloud, you can imagine something/anything and it manifests as a seemingly real object. When Pip’s visual memory is blocked, she can still recall the wooden comfort carvings through tactile memory alone.
This reflects how coping mechanisms are adapted. The tools developed to shield her from pain are now repurposed to shield her from the “dragon.”
Your turn
When you’re overwhelmed, which senses help ground you most?
9. Debussy and Daydreams
I came up with the name Reverie Cloud when thinking of words that sounded pleasant and dreamlike. As a piano player, I love to play and listen to the song Rêverie by Claude Debussy. It’s sleepy and magical. Sadly, Debussy didn’t like his own piece! What would he think if someone one-hundred-thirty years later named her fictional VR sleep tech company after his song?
Listen
10. Finding Your Voice in a Noisy World
Toward the end of Opposite World, readers learn that Pip almost dies inside the program as a child. Her mother saves her, perishing in the process. Yet the only way for Pip’s mother to live on is if Pip accepts a version of her mother’s subconscious. Like inviting Christ into your heart, except it’s your Mom. And she’s being invited into your brain. And there’s no perks like eternal life or anything. Pip encounters a “likeness” of her mother later in the program—a piece of her mother’s subconscious mixed with intelligent coding.
But Victor Janess also becomes trapped in Pip’s mind, and soon both voices occupy her inner thoughts. Her mother’s loving guidance and Victor’s selfish voice become warped together—good and evil. In the end, Pip chooses to silence them both. Even though she loves her mother, quieting her voice is the only way to silence Victor’s. She chooses to find her own voice instead.
In psychotherapy, this is called self-differentiation. It’s the process of separating your authentic self from the internalized voices of others, even those you love. It’s about choosing who you want to be rather than who others have made you.
Pause here
Who still speaks to you, even when they’re not in the room?
Can you recognize where different voices in your mind come from—the critics, the cheerleaders? If you quieted them for a day, what would your own voice say?
Thank you for looking back through Opposite World with me.
Now it’s time for us both to look forward.
Links:
The Strand
Simon and Schuster
BookShop.org
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Amazon UK
Elizabeth Anne Martins 