Gibson utilizes spiritual and psychedelic imagery in describing cyberspace revealing an intention to create more than simply a virtual reality that mimics or copies physical reality. He uses vivid visual and abstract imagery: “phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandal of visual information.” He conjures up a dream-like experience suggestings his use of cyberspace to probe the multifaceted experience of the human condition. He writes
“Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now
Disk beginning to rotate, faster becoming a sphere of paler gray expanding—“ (52)
His use of the verb “pray” is indicative of his religious imagery, but more subtly his paragraph and sentence structure underscores the spiritual tension. Through the choppy single phrase paragraphs, he creates for the reader a temporal transition to parallel the physical crossing of boundaries in technological but also psychological spaces experienced by Case. The passage’s rhythm suggests the pacing and climax to catharsis. Finally, the spiritual and psychological metaphor of cyberspace is most clearly seen in the very introduction of the concept: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators.”(39) This description could just as well be describing religious worship, meditative experiences or dream states. Gibson draws upon elevated states of reality that already exist to create his future vision of cyberspace in order to loop back and comment on the multiplicity of human experience beyond the physical plane.
-Diana Zhu