And, based on a cursory Google search, my theory about how to make sense of the show seems to have very few adherents, if any. The only thing worse than a nerd is a nerd whose pet theory is completely off base.
I think the entire series was essentially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the Ambrose Bierce short story that was made into a famous episode of the Twilight Zone and, not incidentally, glimpsed during an earlier season of Lost. This theory occurred to me a few seasons ago when the show plots devolved into time travel and preposterous gunplay.
The series begins and ends with the opening and closing of Jack’s eye. Those two events bookend the entire run of the show, which took place completely within Jack’s consciousness. The whole series has consisted of Jack’s memories, dreams and projections – onto characters he knew intimately or even fleetingly.
If this theory is true, then the producers were not lying when they said the show’s explanation is not supernatural. It’s purely psychological. There’s no magic, no purgatory: the whole series was Jack’s hypnopompic state (or hypnagogic – I forget which one is which), and in his perception, it went on for six seasons.
I posted this theory on Slate’s entertaining TV Club site devoted to Lost’s sixth season, and I added this query: “Am I overlooking some key element that negates my theory?” Within moments came this response: “yes, the ending shot was of the plane flying overhead, if he died in the crash, there would be no plane and the credit shot would have been the wreckage and bodies.” While I think about whether that shoots my theory out of the water, go ahead and let me know what you think.
The closing credits shot was curious. It was wreckage, no bodies, no live people walking around. In the first couple seasons, the characters pretty much cleaned up the wreckage, right? They took what they needed and we never saw that stuff again. Seeing it with the credits made it look as if the crash site had never been touched by live people. Which made me think that maybe everyone on Oceanic 815 died in the crash, and there were never any people on the island at all.
Which doesn’t make any sense, although how much sense does it make that so many people would’ve survived the crash?
Hypnagogic hallucinations happen as you’re falling asleep.
It would be surpassingly strange for Jack to dream entire back-stories for other people. How often do you have dreams that don’t involve you, where you’re an omniscient witness to things happening to people unaware of your all-seeing eye? Like Sun and Jin in the restaurant with the gangland killers–Jack wasn’t figuring into that story at all.
Actually, I like Dean’s hypnopompic hypothesis. And notice that you never actually see Ambrose Bierce and Jack Shepherd simultaneously in the same part of the time-space continuum! Coincidence? I think not.