@KalliopeKisees wrote:
There is a fantastic play called ‘No Exit.” Your room idea reminds me of it. It “No Exit”, however, the damned are forced to reside in different rooms with people who ulitmatly are thier hell and suffering.
I like your idea a lot, but allow me to expand a bit on the concept of “No exit” and maybe take off in a different direction then you. I’m not aware of your background or in which language you read the play, but in the original version, the quote is ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres” which literally translate into “Hell, is everybody else.”
Sartre later went on to explain that what he meant was that life is perceived and experienced Through everyone else but yourself. we get to know who we are through our experiences with everybody else. By following that logic, in a room full of mirror where the only thing you have access to is yourself, you would lose your sense of self in a certain way which could be a pseudo-philophical explanation of why, when you are under a sleeping curse, you’re not dead but you are not quite alive either.
Anyway, it would be a huge cop out if the writers of OUAT uses “No Exit” as some form of kinda-maybe-ish, source of material to explain the sleeping curse. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good book and an even better play. I just feel like using a book that is a mandatory reading for every 11-12 years old in the french speaking world as an introduction for to a philosophy class, is to greatly underestimate the average viewer of OUAT.
*for the people not familiar with “Huis Clos” or “No Exit”, in the french world, it is a book of about the same cultural importance as “Catcher in the Rye” – not at all the same topic but both books have similar amplitude.