Shadows of Solaris

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? -Plato

The awakening in Solaris, or removal of oneself from the cave, is when Kelvin realizes that his gods were merely constructs of his own imagining; these are the contrivances of earthly understandings which crumble away in the face of the ocean's power. With the power to create or recreate life at will the ocean on Solaris reinvents Kelvin's notion of immortality. His former notion of reality, gleaned from his time on earth, disintegrate when Rheya is resurrected from his subconscious. Is the shadow of reality conjured by Kelvin's time with Rheya on earth more authentic than that which he spends with her shadow on Solaris? The painful truths are revealed only when he re-encounters her contrived being on the foreign planet. This is the reality of which Plato speaks: a painful truth derived from the reality materialized through the mind. Real is entirely subjective.

"We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us--that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence--then we don't like it anymore." -Snow