In Bradbury’s story, the illusion of the veldt is not just real but hyperreal. Lydia’s initial concern about the nursery emerges from how real it is beginning to appear. When George steps inside the space, he begins to sweat under the hot sun and can feel shadows of vultures passing over his face. The lions appear so real and so near to him, he can almost feel the prickling of their fur. Later, Lydia feels the lions are charging at her and rushes out of the nursery. The world of the nursery is described extremely vividly: its skies are too blue, its sun is too hot, its smells are too strong. Since the nursery essentially creates scenarios imagined by the children, these exaggerated sensorial descriptions show that the children need reality to appear more and more real. In other words, even their imagined reality is getting boring. To be continually excited about this reality, the children need to keep exaggerating it. The scenario is close to chasing the thrills offered by video games, where the game world needs to become increasingly immersive for the player to engage with it. The children in the story ultimately need so much stimulation, it can only be achieved by real, graphic violence. Even the death of their parents doesn’t affect them emotionally, existing only as a stimulating spectacle.

In the story, George is unnerved by the nursery’s growing sentience. Still, he notes that even though “occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone” such simulations are “when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery.” George’s confused feelings and statements in this passage highlight how easily the lines between reality and virtual reality can blur. They also showcase his rising anxiety about simulated reality getting too out of hand and coming to replace reality. The nursery is the peak of immersive virtual reality, a world which mirrors the psyches of the children. Lost in this ever-giving, mirror-like virtual world, the children withdraw from the real world. However, the story doesn’t just stop here, with the children lost in their addiction to virtual reality. Bradbury steers the narrative towards the uncanny, mixing elements of horror and fantasy in the dystopian plot. The virtual world actually turns real, with the lions physically eating George and Lydia.

This extreme turn of events shows that Bradbury’s concerns encompass the psychosocial impact of living in an alternate reality. Peter and Wendy first begin to revel in the violence of the virtual world they have created, then begin to relish the scenario of the lions eating their parents, and finally let the lions turn real and consume their parents. The unleashed lions symbolize the children’s anger and violence, unchecked by ethics or empathy. Because the children have forgotten how to live in the real world, they have also forgotten its values and limits. Overdependence on virtual reality leads to the children’s humanity itself being annihilated.