There is a curious incident in the first episode of the television seriesStranger Things. The four teenage boys Will, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas arecut short in the middle of theDungeons & Dragonssession they are con-ducting in Mike’s basement. The game ends, rather unfortunately, witha dice roll miscast on the floor. It’s dinnertime, and the boys have to gohome without finishing their campaign.Will,who has seen the numberon the dice after all, reveals the truth to Mike before he leaves. The rollwas a seven – not enough, according to the rules of the game, for himto be saved from a monster going by the name of Demogorgon. Stand-ing safely on the porch of a suburban family home, young Will shrugs,rather disheartedly, and explains to his best friend: “The Demogorgon,it got me.”Then he adds briskly:“See you tomorrow!”and pedals off intothenightonhisbike.“Itgotme”:isthisshort-handfor‘itwouldhavegot-ten me in the world ofDungeons & Dragons’? Or is it in fact a felicitousand appropriate description of the overall situation? Will seems to feelno contradiction in standing on his best friend’s porch, physically un-harmed, declaring quite seriously that he has been captured by a mon-strous otherworldly creature. He presents the seven on the dice not somuch as the indicator of an illusion but rather as a scary truth to be re-vealedinaquietmomenttoaselectaudience.Contrarytowhatwemightexpect,Will doesn’t behave as if he’s facing airy make-believe on the oneand solid reality on the other hand.It is rather as if he’s facing two real-ities standing curiously side by side. StrangerThingsdissolvesthestrangetensionofthissceneinasettingwhere monsters turn out to be as real as high-school teachers – if fromanother dimension – so that Will’s confession on the porch turns fromweirdly intriguing statement into mere anticipation and irony, a hunchthe boy seems to have had: Will is abducted by a creature not unlike theDemogorgoninhisDungeons&Dragonscampaignandheldcaptiveinthe“Upside Down,” an alternate dimension that is subject to certain physi-cal restrictions but no less part of reality for that. On the night of theinterruptedgame,however,whenWillspeaks,withoutknowingthefatethatwillbefallhiminthenearfuture,oftherole-playgamemonsterthat“got” him, no such revelations about the ‘real’ workings of the universearenecessaryforhiswordstomakeperfectsense.Thesevenonthedice,goingdownatthehandsoftheDemogorgon,theinnocentbickeringbe-tween friends, the average scenery of an average evening in an averageUS-American town sometime towards the end of the 20thcentury, din-ner, riding home on your bike – all those components are there at thesame time,and this is only a contradiction from a certain point of view,namely, if we insist that there is one reality, and in this reality, only cer-tain things are ‘really there,’ and all the other things, while in some way‘there,’aren’t quite‘real’for all that.