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story identification - TV show episode with a woman in a park who keeps "dreaming" of doctors around her



Back in the mid/late 90s I saw a show where a woman and man were having a picnic in a beautiful park. The woman fell asleep and woke up with (maybe) doctors around her that told her everything was okay and to close her eyes. She woke back up at the picnic with the man, and thought she had a bad dream. Then things started “glitching” in the park, kind of like when the holodeck malfunctions in Star Trek.


She then wakes back up with several people around her (maybe doctors) who say she’s in shock and dying. After she dies, the (maybe doctors) say something like “she’s the third one this week” or something like that. The camera pans out and shows that everyone was in a giant building or maybe a ship, and she had been plugged in some kind of machine like The Matrix.



Answer



This is the 1985 Twilight Zone story, "Dreams for Sale."





Per Wikipedia:



On an idyllic outdoor picnic with her husband, their daughters, and their dog, a woman becomes confused and disoriented when her vision stutters and events begin repeating themselves. Eventually, her reality become so distorted with repeating images and sounds that she screams. Waking in a dream-making machine, she discovers she is in the future, alongside hundreds of others. They are all in a sterile, industrial indoor environment. A technician explains to her that she was in a Dreamatron, which is a "Fully Interactive Dream Machine," and it was running a "Country Picnic" program.



He fixes the circuit board for her dream bay and tells her to relax and enjoy her last six minutes before returning to work. Still confused, she returns to her dream world and relaxes again. She tries to tell her husband about her "dream" but forgets it almost straight away. She asks her fantasy husband if she can stay with him there forever. He tells her that yes she can and that he wants her to stay forever, too. Meanwhile, the machine burns out before the technicians can disconnect her, trapping her in the alternate reality forever.


They note, "At least she died happy."



Here is the image of the giant building in the future, which I found impressively creepy when I first saw this story.


Factory


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