Some thoughts from Steve Franklin. One note of caution though… although the additional dialogue in the R1 version is certainly sympathetic to the original script, I personally wouldn’t consider it a canon reference
Something else occurred to me. There are two ways of changing level in Avalon, the VR chair and the Ghost. The VR chair goes down, into a lower “less real” world. The Ghost goes up, into a “more real” world. Ash’s normal reality has a Ghost as well as a VR chair. So she can either go up or down. In the VR world, there is a Ghost, which is very difficult to find, but there is no chair. One simply returns–springs back–to normal reality. This is a trivial exercise and can even be accomplished in the middle of a battle by calling “Reset.” So the “Opera” world, as I will call it, is approached by traveling upwards from the VR world via a Ghost. The streak in Ash’s hair is gone, as Murphy points out, yet this is not the world she left when entering the VR world. The conclusion is obvious. This is *another* reality. If you watch the entry sequence to this other reality, you see Ash being rotated. She is literally being transported to an orthogonal world. That is, a world at right angles to her normal real world, yet real enough in itself. This Opera world also has both a chair and a Ghost. The chair is the way back to the VR world, or some VR world. Remember, she got here by being rotated as she leveled up. There is no guarantee she will return to the same VR world she was in before. Ash has the option to use this chair again to travel back down, but she doesn’t use it. From this, it is obvious that her use of the Ghost in the final scene is not to return to her original normal reality. It is another ladder, another jump upwards, analogous to her using the Ghost in the hospital to travel upwards, yet not to the same place because she is rotating from an already rotated reality. She is most definitely NOT returning to her original reality. This is quite clear from the internal dialogue in the dubbed version. She is making her own reality. This reality will be even more real than the one she is in. Will it be Avalon?