It’s Dreamy!

    Dreams. Are all the events and acting meant to be real, or are they the dreams of a paranoid ex secret agent? The dream theory adopted is that all the action of the series takes place in the mind of the Prisoner, but then he would have to be insane, wouldn’t he? Or perhaps it’s a self persecution complex or maybe an anguish pattern as suggested by the doctor number 14 in ‘A B and C.’

   If ‘the Prisoner’ is all in the mind of Number 6, then he could use this to subconsciously work out his conflict. In this interpretation each Number 2 would be a facet of his own personality. And all the other symbols, the penny farthing bicycle, the Butler, Rover and such like would be metaphors of his own unconscious mind, symbols which he couldn’t express in his waking life. There is evidence for supporting this dream theory, for during the opening sequence to each episode, save for ‘Living In Harmony’ and ‘Fall Out’ the Prisoner passes out in the confines of his own home only to wake up in the confines of The Village! If this is the case then the location of The Village is easily found, it lies somewhere in the mind of the Prisoner, which would explain the sequences becoming more and more bizarre, but would at the same time defeat the main theme of one man versus society and does unnecessarily complicate things. I mean are we to believe that in ‘A B and C’ Number 6 was dreaming about his dreams?

    However if you take things quite literally, then the Prisoner has been rendered unconscious by the use of nerve gas, hasn’t he? He then wakes up again in what at first appears to be his own home, but within the confines of The Village. So if the Prisoner is awake, then what we see is the Prisoner’s imagination, what is taking place in his subconscious. For someone to carry all ‘the Prisoner’ around in his head all the time, well he’d have to be mad!

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