I. A Stranger Reads Him Correctly

The first words spoken by a human being in “Perchance to Dream” are not Edward Hall’s, and they are not the psychiatrist’s. They belong to a man on a sidewalk who has never appeared before and will never appear again, played by an actor the episode does not bother to credit. He watches Hall lurch past him in the middle of an ordinary weekday and he asks the obvious question: Hey, mister. What’s the matter? Are you sick?

Hall says no.

Twenty-five minutes later a doctor will stand over Hall’s body and describe his death in terms that are accurate to everything visible and false to everything that happened. Between those two moments the episode will conduct a long and increasingly desperate experiment in what one person can learn about another from the outside, and it opens by staging the experiment in miniature, on a public street, in seven words. A stranger looks at Hall for perhaps a second and a half and arrives at a diagnosis that is essentially correct. Hall, who has more information about his own condition than anyone alive, denies it.

The exchange is easy to lose. It occupies almost no screen time, it advances nothing, and it is buried under Rod Serling’s narration, which is busy explaining that the hour is noon and that for most of the people in this city the hour will be a rest. But it establishes the terms of everything that follows with a precision no later scene improves on. Observation from outside is crude, instantaneous, and roughly right. Testimony from inside is elaborate, sustained, and unverifiable. The episode will spend its entire length elaborating the inside account, and it will end by handing final authority to a man who has seen almost nothing.

There is also the matter of what Hall’s denial costs him. He has come to this street to find a psychiatrist. He is on his way, at this exact moment, to tell a stranger everything. But the first stranger who asks gets nothing, because the first stranger asks in the wrong register. Are you sick is a question about the body, and Hall’s answer is technically true: he is not sick in the sense the passerby means, not feverish, not drunk, not having a coronary on the pavement. He is doing something for which the sidewalk vocabulary has no word. He is refusing to sleep.

Almost everything that is interesting about this episode lives in that gap between a question and the answer it fails to reach.

II. The Shortest Shadow

The narration establishes the hour before it establishes the man, and the hour it establishes is noon.

This is a deliberate and slightly perverse choice, and it should not be flattened into a contrast between daylight and darkness. Nothing in the episode’s imagery cares much about the sun. What noon supplies is not brightness but ordinariness of a very specific institutional kind. Noon is the hour the working day sets aside. It is licensed rest, rest by arrangement, rest that thousands of people take simultaneously without any of them thinking about it. Serling’s narration names the crowd twice, once as ordinary people and once as most of them, and the second naming is what matters, because it carves Hall out of a population that is at this moment doing the one thing he must not do.

The lunch hour is a small daily rehearsal for sleep. It is the interval in which a working adult is permitted to stop. Everyone in the frame around Hall is stopping. He alone has an appointment with a man whose profession is to help people stop, and he is arriving at it in a state of total refusal.

Set against this, the phrase Serling uses for what is coming — an hour, still to come — does a good deal of quiet work. It measures the remainder of Hall’s life in the same unit the city uses for its break. One hour: enough for a sandwich, enough for an appointment, enough for the entire remaining span of a man. The narration is not being ominous. It is being administrative, and the administrative register is far more unsettling, because it files Hall’s death under the ordinary business of the working day.

The episode then puts him inside a tall building. The image of the skyscraper has attracted some claims about stock footage which are not worth repeating without better evidence than currently exists, but the choice itself needs no provenance to be meaningful. Height enters the episode in the first thirty seconds as a fact of urban architecture, before anyone has mentioned falling, before the window has been opened, before the roller coaster has been built. A man who works as a draftsman walks into a building of the kind draftsmen draw. He rides up. The elevation that will kill him is established as ordinary commercial real estate.

And then he passes the receptionist.

III. We’ve Been Expecting You

She tells him they have been expecting him, and to go right in.

It is the most conventional sentence a receptionist can produce. It is also, on any careful accounting, the single most consequential line of dialogue in the episode, and the reasons for that will not become fully visible for another twenty minutes. For now the sentence does what such sentences do: it ...