Distractions: I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own

Desmond: You have a choice. You can come with me or stay here, keep drinking, and ruin your musical career.

Charlie: That's not much of a choice, is it?

There are rules to the game that's being played, and one of the biggest ones is that people must be free to make their own choices. Ben knew this well, and understood that even though he couldn't force anyone's hand he could alter the circumstances enough to do just that, the only difference being that there was an illusion of choice. He knew it well enough, and was at points candid enough about it as well, telling Jack that his life hung on Jack's choice whether or not to operate on him. The Monster, faced with trying to recruit the late Jacob's candidates, couldn't take Sun because she had knocked herself out and so couldn't consent to being folded into the Monster's scheme. The Monster can only ask people to join with him, but his methods of persuasion can be blunt. Often it comes down to "join me or perish". Jacob, during his time as a mostly corporeal being, was infintely more subtle in his machinations. A weaver of experience, time and space, he crafted the survivor's lives in such a way that made the choices he wanted them to make more obvious. He took minor villain Ben's tactic to the extreme, and wove a compelling reality around his subjects, bringing out their neuroses, fears, idiosyncrasies, positioning them in their roles as the ultimate Doctor, Shaman, Priest, Fugative, Lover, Fighter. When your choices are framed by privation, death, spirits, ocean, and jungle, they are tough and few. But let's look at Charlie's response to Desmond's
ultimatum.

Charlie: You have a choice. You can either see what I'm telling you about or you can get out of the car.

Desmond: Why would I want to get out of the car?

Charlie refuses the reality that has been given to him. He gives Desmond a seemingly nonsensical ultimatum of his own: get out or see it what I'm talking about. Charlie's reality is an empty one of drugs and gigs and drugs, and he sees that Desmond's is equally meaningless, but Desmond either doesn't see it or denies it. It takes Desmond and Charlie's near deaths as Charlie steers Desmond's rental car into the ocean to reveal the cracks in their realities--through which they could see the golden and doomed universe where the survivors are constantly sucked towards the island vortex. Charlie struck outside of the bounds, revealing choices that could be made and potentialities beyond the confines of their universe, for better or for worse.

Desmond is now the first person in both universes to have knowledge of each, however fragmentary. He's now poised to take steps to break the cycle perpetuated by Eloise Hawking/Widmore and Jacob, the cycle that destroyed Faraday before he was born and Locke before he could understand.