Normal Again- What is normal?

I thought that Normal Again was a very powerful episode, partially because I am very interested in psychology, but also because it demonstrates the incredibly thin line that separates reality and imagination. What it really comes down to is belief. Buffy decided that she believed in herself and that meant that she chose to live in the world as the Slayer. I’m not even really sure which of those realities Joss Whedon believes is real, because the ending is so ambiguous. Perhaps all that he was saying is that there is no true ‘reality’, it is simply about what we choose to see and believe. The moment that Buffy chooses to believe in herself and therefore chooses the reality of being a slayer, her ‘insane’ self essentially dies. That doesn’t mean that either of those two worlds is real, it only shows us that Buffy chooses to live in the world of Sunnydale, which is an important choice for her at this moment in the series, but it still doesn’t make it real. Buffy is not given any kind of tangible evidence for either world to be real. There is absolutely nothing that happens in either world that makes it appear to be the true reality, only the opinions of the people in each world. Buffy can only choose between the two because she has to pick which one feels more like her or feels more like reality. We will never know if Buffy as the Vampire Slayer is an escape from her reality or if putting herself in an institution was a way of escaping from the reality and pressure of being the slayer.
This choice is essentially what we all must live with and confront in our daily lives, but particularly in our ability to read Gothic novels. We’ve discussed a lot in class the concept of suspension of belief and the idea that we must accept the abnormal and impossible in order to fully immerse ourselves in these stories. For the most part that has been easy, except for Castle of Otranto, where some people had trouble putting our reality aside in order to accept the oddness of tale. A lot of this has to do with the absurdity of what happens in Castle of Otranto and the fact that things seem to happen for no apparent reason, whereas the other books always have a reason and explanation for such supernatural occurrences. The way to read this book is to go into it with an open mind and an acceptance of the strange and unnatural. In this way, Normal Again teaches us the perfect lesson: belief is a choice, no more. There are multiple realities, multiple ways of looking at the same time, and many ways in which we can each exist. That doesn’t mean that we each have our own fantasy world where we are Slayers or something similar, but it does mean that there isn’t a single way of understanding the world around us and there isn’t a single definition for ‘normal’.