I caught a lot of Twilight Zone episodes while growing up, including a lot of repeats, but I don't recall ever seeing this one. I'm sure I would have remembered it because I used to dream a lot as a kid too, especially recurring ones of flying and another that involved escaping a gorilla in the attic. I always wondered about that old conundrum whether you would actually die for real if you died in a dream, and how the theory could never be tested because you would wake up in fright first. Well there's another subject I'll have to put on my list of things to research when I can get around to it.
'Perchance to Dream' is a lot like one of those time travel stories that make your head hurt when you try to analyze them after the fact. Because when you come right down to it, Edward Hall's (Richard Conte) experience here was entirely a dream. It had to be, because he was asleep as soon as he hit the couch in Dr. Rathmann's (John Larch) office. He never had a real conversation with the Doc, and the entire escapade with Maya the Cat Girl (Suzanne Lloyd) took place on a variety of subliminal levels. I have to say the entire carnival motif was well played out, an oft used setting by a variety of writers and directors, including Hitchcock in the finale of "Strangers on a Train". It lends an even more surreal character to Hall's dilemma as he walks a delicate tightrope between the real and the imaginary.
Yet for all that, this is like one of those imaginary Superman stories from an early 1960's DC comic, the episode never really happened after Hall entered Larch's office. The boyhood story about the moving sailboat and Maya's sultry seduction are effective head fakes designed to keep us intrigued about Hall's condition, but all the while everything we're exposed to is the subconscious reverie from the doctor's couch. It ends with that single rare but fatal instance in a fleeting moment that none of us will ever get a chance to experience, trapped in a nightmare before ever hitting the ground.
'Perchance to Dream' is a lot like one of those time travel stories that make your head hurt when you try to analyze them after the fact. Because when you come right down to it, Edward Hall's (Richard Conte) experience here was entirely a dream. It had to be, because he was asleep as soon as he hit the couch in Dr. Rathmann's (John Larch) office. He never had a real conversation with the Doc, and the entire escapade with Maya the Cat Girl (Suzanne Lloyd) took place on a variety of subliminal levels. I have to say the entire carnival motif was well played out, an oft used setting by a variety of writers and directors, including Hitchcock in the finale of "Strangers on a Train". It lends an even more surreal character to Hall's dilemma as he walks a delicate tightrope between the real and the imaginary.
Yet for all that, this is like one of those imaginary Superman stories from an early 1960's DC comic, the episode never really happened after Hall entered Larch's office. The boyhood story about the moving sailboat and Maya's sultry seduction are effective head fakes designed to keep us intrigued about Hall's condition, but all the while everything we're exposed to is the subconscious reverie from the doctor's couch. It ends with that single rare but fatal instance in a fleeting moment that none of us will ever get a chance to experience, trapped in a nightmare before ever hitting the ground.