(2.) Changeling Trouble
Remember that dream we all had as kids?
Some months ago, I was stoned in my friend’s bedroom. A couple of us were taking a siesta from the housewarming party happening in the backyard whilst hiding from the hair-trigger temper of the orange cat that shared the apartment. Two of them laid in her bed and I was in a lounge chair at the foot of it, my body an anchor at rest, my mouth starting to monologue:
“Remember that recurring dream we all had as kids? The one where there’s two of your mom? And they’re both standing there pleading with you to recognize them as the real one? But they’re physically identical, so you have to come up with the perfect question: the one only your real mom would know? And so in your waking hours, you prattle on and on inside your own mind, trying to craft the perfect, obscure question? But of course you’re a child, so how much depth does your biography have? How elusive can you really get? But you just know you have to prepare for it to happen?”
They pondered it thoughtfully, and then finally one of them broke the silence: “I’ve never had that dream in my life.” We all bust out laughing, then I sighed and released a humored but dejected “fuck.”
I’ve been thinking about this exchange since it happened. It’s hilarious and nagging. The memory of those nightmares is so ingrained in me that I’ve never given them much thought, never mind considered that it wasn’t a joint human experience. I figured it fell under that category of common dreams, like losing your teeth, falling, or being naked in public.
I asked my best friend if she ever had the dream, to which I received a firm, predictable “no.” But she asked me a question in exchange: “how did you even know about the concept of changelings at that young of an age?” It’s a question I still can’t answer, which I take, perhaps in misguided fashion, to mean that this is something primal within me; baked in. Learning what I can extract from these early seeds of my now pathologized anxiety has become a task at the forefront of my introspection.
I got these nightmares all the time growing up, but I never told my mom about them. I think it was out of some fear or instinct that it was a sacred process — the crafting of The Question that is — and if I revealed the haunt to my mother, it might affect my discernment later. A child of single digits, I’d spend conscious time wondering what question to ask the doubles when I encountered them next, but to this day, I don’t remember what I decided.
As is likely evident, my history with doppelgängers is a shockingly chaptered, sordid, and complicated affair. Perhaps even a love-hate one. The anxiety I had as a child has followed me into my adulthood, though with more practicality. I no longer fear the premiere of maternal changelings, but I do fear becoming someone people don’t recognize, or vice versa. Whether watching my grandmother go through early stages of dementia or examining myself in the aftermath of the first traumatic event of my adulthood, I’m hyperaware of people in past and present.
After an egregiously bad high, this all exacerbated, and my body was wracked with dissociative panic attacks on a loop for weeks after. I was having crises of pretty much every kind, but prominently spiritually. Never a religious person, I found myself needing answers for how the hell we all got here, and requiring knowingly nonexistent data to make it make sense to me. I bartered with myself on what religion would fix the fear. I had never been so pestered by the question of existence, and it tore me wide open.
Before all this happened to me, what did I believe? How was I comfortable with it? I started looking at myself in definitions of before and after the episode, and feeling unable to identify with either. During a particularly bad panic attack, I remember crying to my mother, “do you recognize me?” I felt as if I’d become an entirely different person, burdened in a wider plane where I was unable to find my footing. Suspended somewhere in the vague viscera of my muscle and bone, drifting (I hoped) back to my own brain, I inhabited myself as a changeling in my own body.
I still haven’t fully reconciled the weight by which doppelgängers have influenced my life in chapters, from childhood until now. On good days, I want to understand it and on bad days, my inner changeling is something to cope with. What has seemed most potent to me is that up until my stoned confession, I never noticed this as a theme in my life, despite the fact that many of my favorite pieces of art and media deal with doubles, body swaps, and changelings.
The questions I now seek to answer through these pieces of media are as follows: What does the artful double provide? And what can I learn about myself through the media I cherish so much? What do we have to learn about sentience through the threat of a duplicate?
Exhibit A: The Double dir. Richard Ayoade (2013)
The gist: Jesse Eisenberg plays an office drone, Simon James: shy, a pushover, and hardly noticed by anyone. One day his doppelgänger, James Simon, is hired by the company and he’s everything Simon is not: confident, punchy, and forthright. When no one notices that they’re identical, James attempts to take over Simon’s life whilst Simon fights for his right to exist.
In Richard Ayoade’s Kafka-esque world, everything feel anachronistic, somehow vintage but also undeniably futuristic. It’s perfectly timeless. The grounded part of his tale is the existential battle at its center. The movie is about self-assertion and what it might take for someone to demand to be seen.
Simon writes on a piece of paper, “To whom it may concern: I am a ghost.” And in an exchange with a coworker, he pleads, “I exist.” to which they say, “And?” Here doubles signify a proposed flexibility of personhood. What is sentience? And does it count if you only recognize it yourself? Is it something given or earned?
I think this is pretty much the great existential question, the one sought after by religion, spirituality, and even atheism. Regardless of belief system or lack of, everyone yearns for answer to what makes an individual human, occupying a world filled by others we also can’t spiritually account for. In what is essentially a battle of wits with his doppelgänger, Simon’s wallflower nature puts him at an inherent disadvantage. But the worry is: why should that matter?
I find so much comfort and emotional visibility in this film. I feel empowered more than scared, because it takes the doppelgänger dilemma and puts the power in the hands of the unseen half. It gives authority to the fearful and shows that there’s a way to transform trepidation to power.
Exhibit B: Invasion of the Body Snatchers dir. Philip Kaufman (1978)
The gist: San Francisco is changing almost imperceptibly. People are starting to claim that their loved ones are not their loved ones. They can’t explain how, as physically, everyone is as they’ve always been. They have the same bodies, histories, and memories, but something about them is simply “off.” What therapists and skeptics write off as mass hysteria is an alien enemy force set on taking over the whole city, replacing every citizen within it with robotic, unfeeling duplicates.
The film’s source material is a novel of the same name, published in 1955, and is quite easily seen as a metaphor for McCarthyism. While the 1978 adaptation of this movie modernizes itself, this idea of a loved one becoming unrecognizable due to political affiliation is something we’ve encountered a lot since 2016. I can’t say this is what I’ve gotten from the film, but for many people I know, this silent transformation isn’t foreign.
For me, what I get out of this movie (other than rockstar performances and slimy body horror) is an allegory of mental health struggles: a prying and parasitic thing that demands to survive on its host, at times hollowing them into states of graceless apathy. How does a battle with mental illness change a person? And what can be done to bring them back to stasis? To the naked eye one might seem the same, but to those close they understand the difference, and all it takes is the determination of a person’s village to care, not just to identify it, but fight it as best they can.
Changelings here are the shifting states I fear the most, and the one with which I most identify: a pondered version of the Capgras delusion. But there’s something comforting in watching my fear play out to a conclusion, even as the ride through the movie is anxiety-inducing (though lots of fun too).
Exhibit C: Severance created by Dan Erickson (2022-present)
The gist: A group of office workers have had their consciousness and memory split between work life and home life. This severance procedure makes it so that each worker is embodied by two personas who know little to nothing of each other’s lives, loves, hardships, and goals. And further, each figure is being utilized by the company to a mysterious end goal. The big Q is: at what cost?
The only reason I fear this less than “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is because I’d never elect to do this to myself. However, in a more quotidian way, I think this series ruminates on the question, what if your relief was your undoing?
Mark chooses severance to escape, as much as he can, about eight hours worth of grief a day. He was sold on a partial solution to near unbearable pain, but that solution made him ripe for exploitation. “Severance” is a tale of both internal changelings a more traditional doppelgänger scenario: despite sharing a body, each has agency to act against the interests of the other, and innies and outies have a rare, but when occurring, profound ability to swap places.
The artful double here unpacks escapism as entrapment. This is something to be found in many avenues of life, but is the solution moderation or discernment? It’s kind of an impossible question, but one I reflect on a lot, as a general human in the world, but also as a citizen of the current political climate.
How many hours a day do we we want to sever from in the same spirit of Mark’s grief or Dylan’s fear of mediocrity? And how many of those hours are actually serving us? What does severance look like in a non-science fiction world? Is it partying or doom scrolling, sleeping or living in endless feeds of TikTok’s relief? Escapism is beyond necessary, but the doses are self-prescribed. We can’t be engaged all hours of the day, but I also argue on behalf of myself, that I’m not aware of how much I’m taking on the chin and how much I’m letting fly over my head. Whether the burden is political, familial, platonic, or romantic, “Severance” has made me more aware of how I engage with my own pain.
These are just three of my favorite pieces of entertainment, but Hollywood has relished in the idea of doubles and changelings at a large scale — Us (2019), Mickey 17 (2025), The Substance (2024), Black Swan (2010), and conversely but still accurately, the beloved The Parent Trap (1998).
I’ve come to find that I both fear and relish the concept of the artful double. It raises more questions than it answers, but those queries are of magnificent existential value. Something that’s been so inherent to my life thus far (which feels profoundly realistic though still slightly melodramatic to say) operated for years on a dreadful basis, and a simple proposal, high at the foot of my friend’s bed, has led me to unravel some pesky knots within myself. The process of this pain and prodding has been resentful and rewarding, but I think a lot of self-submersion tends to feel that way. I’m grateful for it in the end.