LAST EDITED ON Mar-12-14 AT 06:56 PM (EDT)
 
What you have in The Matrix is, for all intents and purposes, good ol' fashioned astral travel dressed up with a lot of technobabble. When you look past the trappings, the setting is steeped in mysticism, some acknowledged, some not. (My thought after my first viewing, all those years ago: "it's Mage: The Awakening: the Movie.")

Further irony is that it would make perfect sense for this being the real mechanism behind the (other) Matrix in the SR setting - that techies somehow stumbled upon a backdoor to the astral, a form of it that exists in / reflects computer systems, like the "regular" kind mirrors the "real" world - and would explain most of the decking genre conventions which, when you come down to it, are lifted (sometimes with very little modification) from shaman dream journeys et al. Different tools, same result. But as far as I know, SR has never acknowledged this, and insists on pretending that they're completely separate things.

Oh, almost forgot - as noted in an ancient but still googleable review I did of Cybergeneration, the lighter-and-softer sequel/update of Cyberpunk, the new (wireless) interface did do away with lethal feedback... but could still hit you with nasty subliminals, "basilisks", seizure-inducers, etc etc, or just a full-sensory sim of being on the wrong end of a Mortal Kombat Fatality. No actual damage (except perhaps to your SAN), but still very unpleasant.