Besides illustrating the concept of iterations — nested Russian-doll realities — The Thirteenth Floor affords us several other opportunities to see where we might be and where we might be going on the spiritual terrain. There are three timeframe/realities being inhabited/depicted in The 13th Floor; a slightly desaturated 1937, a noirish 1999 which we assume to be Reality Prime, and a sunny 2024 revealed toward the end. Oops, I meant to say spoiler alert. 

In The 13th Floor, supposedly real people in the 2024 reality have unreal counterparts in the 1999 reality, who’ve invented the same technology to create their own downstream counterparts and sub-reality, circa 1937, so that, in effect, a top-level character in 2024 has an inhabitable avatar in 1999, who in turn has one in 1937. The movie confines itself to three tiers, but in theory, there’s no limit.