The idea of identification draws on the paradigm of two levels, as in a real person merging their identity with some fictional construct, say a person sitting before a screen in a movie house and identifying with a character in the photo-play. As the person you lose yourself and live the character's story, but occasionally you can check-in with your body, scratch an itch, remember where you are and what your plans are for after the show. You want to be involved in the story in spite of yourself, to be coerced by the dramatic force of the narrative, but you also want to retain your autonomy, your subjectivity of last resort. There is a deeper sense in which such consciously understood identification is the clue for discovering unconscious identifications, perhaps an endless series of false bottoms to the world. So in the paradigm the actual identification is with the person in the theatre, the one thought to be real; and the structure of identification is marked precisely by such a token of the ground reality. The most engrossing of fictional narratives are just those in which the character unmasks their own errors of misapprehension, and which unfold as a carefully plotted revelation or anagnorisis. On the one hand this points to the high stakes in the game of illusion and on the other it reassures you that your internal compass for truth is sufficient to participate in such a game, even, and especially, when the opponent, the agent of illusion, the dream-spinner, is felt in retrospect the have 'cheated'. In the deeper illusion you never see the theatre, only the theatre on the screen, and the watcher is never seen, never checks in, never needs to.