Reality being what it is right now, doesn’t an alternative sound tempting? That’s what I was thinking the other day, in my apartment, when I adjusted the Velcro straps on my Oculus Quest, a chunky virtual-reality headset made of black plastic, rubber, and a few billion transistors. The headset blocks all ambient light from the wearer’s eyes—the razzle-dazzle happens inside. I looked as if a gerbil’s casket had been plastered onto the upper half of my face. There was a faint new-car smell.

I pressed the Power button and found myself in the center of a computer-rendered 3-D glass geodesic dome with a million-dollar view of mountains. Sensors in the V.R. headset tracked my movements and instantaneously rejiggered the mise-en-scène. Gazing up, I saw stars; turning full circle, I took in a few Danish-modern sofas, a bookcase, and potted plants. Oh, look, I thought, my Oculus has a fireplace! (For a moment, I considered ditching my apartment and moving, with my headset, into a closet.) In the “living room” was an enormous floating display with a menu of options from Oculus—apps and games that I could buy for $9.99 to $29.99 (some are free). Should I travel aboard the International Space Station and experience zero gravity? Take a guided Tai Chi class? Create 3-D paintings in the air? Have a tête-à-tête with Jesus, who would lead me in a guided meditation? (The In His Presence V.R. Web site asks, “How can God fit into your crowded life with everything else on your plate?”) Disunion, the guillotine simulator, was discontinued, so I’d have to find another way to imagine what it was like to be executed during the French Revolution—perhaps I could download the app produced by Excedrin that allows one to feel what it’s like to have a migraine? (Philosophical query: Is it O.K. to cancel a real-life appointment because you have a virtual headache?)

Using the remote control, whose position and buttons are tracked by the headset (there is one for each of your hands), I pointed a light beam at one of the selections—“First Steps,” the introductory tutorial—and pulled a trigger. I learned how to manipulate objects with my glowing white avatar hands. I practiced picking up bright-colored polygons and dropping them to the ground, played tetherball, operated a drone, and swing-danced with a character who bore a resemblance to the M&Ms mascot. If you’d been there, you’d have heard me say “Wow!” an obnoxious number of times. With no visual evidence of the outside world, it was easy to forget that I was in my kitchen. The sensation of being caught up in an illusory scenario is the Nirvana of a well-designed virtual experience. In V.R. circles, this phenomenon of believability is known as “presence,” and it is why your heart rate spikes and you duck for cover when a pretend animated avalanche cascades toward you.

Back in the fakescape of my tutorial, I stretched out my arm to press an imaginary button on an imaginary console on an imaginary table, then lost my balance and fell off the stool I was sitting on, slamming onto the very real floor. I broke my toe. This was a minor misfortune compared with that of the Russian man who, while wearing V.R. goggles, crashed into a glass table and bled to death, according to a TASS news story. The Oculus has a feature that allows you to map out a safe zone and then warns you when you’ve stepped past the perimeter, but I’d been sitting down.

Fortunately, synthetic globe-trotting is not toe-dependent. During the next several weeks, in various offices and media labs, I had adventures that in the physical world would defy the laws of physics but would be business as usual in a Looney Tunes cartoon. In a warehouse in Pennsauken, New Jersey, lying face down on a contraption that looked as if it were built for medieval torture, I flapped my arms, which were strapped to plastic “wings,” and flew like a bird over New York City. I played a starring role in scenarios designed to educate students, train employees, treat depressed adolescents, help football quarterbacks find open receivers, teach doctors how to communicate with patients, tour college campuses, help police de-escalate tense situations, and increase over-all empathy. I stood next to Lincoln’s ear on Mt. Rushmore.

What to do first? There are hundreds of so-called experiences in the Oculus store, and more that I could import from YouTube and other Web sites. Since gaming makes up most of the consumer V.R. market, there was also a vast geekdom of games. However, most of them seemed more like 3-D versions of existing video games than like radical reinventions of the form, so I chose not to focus on them. Even if the apps were available in 5-D, I doubt that I’d enjoy playing Genital Jousting or Hold My Beer, in which the player is dared to perform stunts, like crossing a busy road, while algorithmically inebriated.

I searched for something sober-minded, and found the Anne Frank House, an app that would allow me to navigate through the secret annex of the office building where Frank and seven others hid during the Second World War. The experience is interactive, so I gained access to the hideaway just as its occupants did—by pulling open a hinged bookcase. The actual museum, in Amsterdam, is empty, the contents having been cleared out by the arresting officers in 1944. In the app version, the hideout has been convincingly restaged (with Anne’s glasses, her father’s Dickens novel). Up in the claustrophobic attic, I could hear the ominous sounds of a plane overhead, birds chirping outside, and the creaking floorboards. But most heartbreaking to me was seeing the pencil marks on the wall showing how much Anne had grown during the years in which the family was in hiding.

After the attic, I needed company, so I decided to try a social V.R. platform. These digital 3-D stomping grounds allow groups of people, represented by avatars, to gather in real time for concerts, sporting events, dance parties, writing workshops, or meetings, or just to hang out. Ryan Schultz, a reference librarian at the University of Manitoba and a V.R. blogger, credits them with lifting his depression. Describing himself in the realm outside his Oculus, he wrote, “To be honest, I kinda suck at this whole reality business.” Now he straddles both cosmos, a recent high point being an evening in which he joined five hundred avatars in a marathon game of drag-queen bingo.

One Wednesday, I had a big night out on a platform called AltspaceVR. With an elegant green-and-blue robot avatar as my stand-in, I ventured forth into “Mingle and Chill,” an event held weekly from eight to eight-thirty. It felt like an avant-garde production of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” If an avatar mingled in a way that bothered me, there were misanthropic measures that I could take. I could mute it, make it invisible to me, or install a bubble around my avatar that insulated me from the offending party—a nifty add-on that some tech entrepreneur should consider offering in the real world. Hearing an announcement that the event was about to begin, I hurried through the bar area, where avatars were chatting, and found myself in a place that resembled a suburban Reform synagogue—sleek, unadorned, full of natural light, with, up front, a slightly raised bimah for the moderator. About fifty avatars, in the forms of robots and humans, milled around, some high-fiving one another, some hovering in the air like drones.