Valence Point Threshold

This is a concept that could go anywhere, figuratively and literally. Its title refers to a psychological term that describes the goodness (positive valence) or badness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. What’s more, both the title and tag line accentuate the reaction of the viewer rather than play on the subject matter of the visual itself (a novel, welcome, and somewhat accidental manner of interpretation). To wit, one might take our haunted (or is that haunting) protagonist as either escaping the confines of some dark research facility or venturing forth as a sentinel to protect its secrets (and maybe his own). Maybe he’s fleeing a broken home life and just wanting to play? Adding to the ambivalence of the scenario, an emergency vehicle of unknown purpose in the distance seems to have interrupted its pursuit out of caution or perhaps compassion to guard him (or maybe warn us). Like some spectre, he drifts to the boundary of his existence (and ours) awaiting or promoting some unknown outcome: Punishment? Rescue? Play? All? None? You would know if you lived it. He grips in his hand a cherished memento of his childhood: a peculiar teddy bear that seems to have imbued him with a supernatural ability to hover above the reality of his situation, unencumbered by the weight of his memories perhaps by way of an aura of preserved innocence. Finally, his being clad in pyjamas adds to the question of whether what he and us are experiencing is but a dream. Whoever of us wakes up first will have that answer, and quite possibly, even more questions than we had before we went to sleep as a matter of encroaching their own boundaries.