This is a small piece of writing I did about the Twilight zone TV series (1985).
Entering the twilight zone
by Natalia Bonet
You unlock this door with the key of imagination; beyond it it’s another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind, you’re moving into a land of both shadows and substance, of things and ideas, you just crossed over into the twilight zone.
Every Sunday night, when I was a child, I would crawled in bed with my parents to watch the twilight zone, it was the 1985 series and it was dubbed into Spanish but the content was the same, the incredible tales of fantasy, horror and science fiction by writers such as Ray Bradbury and its creator, Rod Serling. It was aired just after Alfred Hitchcock presents, and although we enjoyed guessing the plot twist of Alfred Hitchcock’s stories, the twilight zone meant a whole different experience. For me, besides meaning spending time with my parents and procrastinating my bedtime, the twilight zone meant entering a different world, a world where anything could happen, it was my first approach to what I call the logic of possibility. The premise of most episodes was the same, someone will wake up one day to find her/his reality changed in one small aspect, and this initial shift will reorganize the world around it, unavoidably leading the person into an alternate reality. After the initial change occurred, all the consequences will follow a very eloquent pattern, that way, we, the audience, were confronted once and again with different logics; the logic of the fantastic, the logic of the horrifying, the logic of the absurd. The idea that one’s life could derail at any given point and one could crossover to one of these alternative logics was for me always a frightening one and it didn’t matter if the episode was actually disturbing, sad or even funny, I always ended up feeling scared. It’s understandable how those stories can shake the sense of reality of an eight year old girl and filled her head with impossible questions. Are we characters in a play without knowing it? Are we been dreamt by a superior being? Are we the toys for the children of some giant alien species? Is there actually a zoo where you can drop neglecting parents? Are there blue men building space in the slots of future time? Nevertheless I believe that sense of possibility should stay with us for the rest of our lives, and not only because is a good exercise for the imagination, but because it also means experiencing the world in a broader sense, beyond the prefixed image of what we are taught to believe is real. That’s why I am still a fan of all those TV shows and movies that make you question the workings of the world, although, watching them is not always a pleasant experience. A few weeks ago, I rented the first season with my partner and after watching a few incredible episodes we went to bed, after a few minutes he asked me why I wouldn’t turn off the light, and I told him: “don’t you understand? We’ve just entered the twilight zone”.
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