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The Virtual Companion Who May Calm Your Fears — and It’s Not a Hallucination
Being alone in any situation may be more difficult for anyone experiencing social anxiety, but a creative solution with “real” help may be on the horizon.
Movie buffs may remember the Jimmy Stewart film Harvey (see it on Amazon), where a man has an over six-foot-plus invisible rabbit friend with whom he travels around his hometown. Of course, the man, Elwood P. Dowd, is viewed as suffering from a mental illness made obvious by his visual hallucination that accompanies Dowd to his favorite bar for drinks with friends. Dowd is an eccentric who believes Harvey has the power to stop time and send someone to any destination they wish. Wouldn’t we like those two powers for ourselves sometimes?
How did he meet Harvey? While performing an act of kindness to help a drunken man home in a cab. At that moment, Harvey appeared. Sort of like a guardian angel, I suppose. The idea of angels coming to Earth to help mortals was replete in 1940s films, a time when hope was one thing everyone needed during and immediately after wartime.
Hope helps us persevere when all seems to point to a problematic future. Today, angels have been replaced by superbeings/superheroes with…
