The 'red pill' in The Matrix movie has become a trope for awakening someone from a world of illusions, a Virtuality; but the movie - being a mainstream product - gets the effect significantly wrong.
In the The Matrix the red pill taker awakens from normal, modern, everyday reality to a nightmarish physical situation in which humans are used as 'batteries' - which makes little sense. But the original idea was that that the red-piller would realise that his human brain was one of millions interconnected to form a vast living computer - which makes a lot more sense. Anyway, the sequence goes from a pleasant but false imagined fake-reality; to an horrific physical reality.
We certainly live already and increasingly in a fake and manipulative Matrix world of Virtuality; but the real waking-up is to a mental horror; not a physical horror. It is awakening to recognise that what we have being believing and wanting and striving-for is evil.
...Waking to discover that we have been actively arguing and working-for the implementation of a totalitarian world of humans under omni-surveillance and micro-control with the objective of persuading us to hate virtue, beauty and truth and love their opposite; persuading us to reject God, Good and Heaven and instead actively to desire our own damnation.
To live in the Matrix is to live wholly within The System - which is, increasingly The World; and therefore to live by the values of The System.
To awaken is to recognise and to experience another world beyond The System, outside Virtuality; and to recognise that it is the Real World.
But this awakened-to Real World is not physical, but Christian and 'spiritual; however, it is not just spiritual - nor is it 'oridinary' Christianity as externally instantiated in Book, Institution, Behaviours: rather the awakening is to the here-and-now experience of chosen-conscious-active participation in the divine work of loving creation.
I have called this Real World: Romantic Christianity.
It is not a world that we can dwell-in on a lasting basis, this side of the portal that is death; but it is more than a mere 'glimpse' or 'taste' of Heaven to come (if we want Heaven); it is a mild and brief experience of what it is to be in Heaven.
So (contra the movie); the real red pill experience of wakening out-from the Matrix is not just pleasant, nor just happy: it is literally Heavenly.
