Navigating Alternate Realities

Levels of reality, from the ordinary to states of intoxication and delirium, to the supernatural

How do writers render different states of reality? Whether magical realist, fever delirium, drunken misperception, or another sort of alternate reality, the transitions between such worlds must be handled with care. Confusion is part of what is wanted here, almost by definition – the question What is real? is supposed to be on our mind — but how much confusion or uncertainty can a reader take, and to what extent do writers answer the question or leave it for our interpretation?

In Beloved, Toni Morrison gradually ramps up the eeriness of her embodied ghost. One of the most frightening moments has Beloved becoming a succubus who after driving Paul D from bed to bed (She moved him), accosts him in the cold shed and commands him to have sex with her. He refuses, but then finds himself doing it…commanded by her to act against his will. We know that Beloved is an incarnation of the baby who died, and we know she has real power in the world to cause harm, from hitting Denver to choking Sethe, but this is the first time we see her controlling others, and we see it through Paul D, as it sneaks up on him:

he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again. Softly and then so loud it woke Denver, then Paul D himself. "Red heart. Read heart. Red heart."

So, was Paul D only dreaming, or was the visit real? It is written in such a way to suggest that both are true, a reading that pans out when Beloved later turns up pregnant.

In Denis Johnson's story "Emergency," the drug-addled protagonist encounters a vision during a snowstorm:

On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels, I would have messed my pants for fear.

Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man!"

"The drive-in." I wasn't sure what these words meant.

A difference here from the ghost scene in beloved is that the reader knows only what the protagonist does. We experience the vision with him, as a moment of transcendence, and only learn it's prosaic reality afterward. As a result, we enjoy that transcendent feeling. In the previous example, the foreknowledge of the reader (before Paul D becomes cognizant of the ghost) lends a sense of the uncanny.

In the one case, the seemingly normative (if unethical) nighttime visit is revealed to be uncanny, and our foreknowledge makes us fearful for Paul D. Morrison has us believing in this ghost, and her power. What will she do to him? In the Johnson, we are swept up in the transcendent perceptions of the protagonist, and are able experience his wonder, but then the dream is shattered by reality. Remarkably, though, the wonder isn't much diminished when it turns out to be directed at that misperceived relatively pedestrian thing, a drive-in. In both cases, the author is fully in control of how much we know and what we believe in, and when or for how long.

Another snow dream occurs in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, when Hans Castorp hallucinates while freezing in a hut on a mountain in a blizzard. In this passage, we know very well that Castorp is delirious, so we never believe in the vision ourselves. The tension arises from the worry we feel about his survival and the release we see in him, a generally buttoned-down young man, through the vision. He's so cold his left leg feels wooden and he feels "pulled to lie down in the snow," and he begins to lose consciousness. Although most of Magic Mountain is in third person, this section slides into Hans Castorps first-person point of view.

"Quiet, quiet — if the head be heavy, let it droop. The wall is good, a certain warmth seems to come from the logs — probably the feeling is entirely subjective. — Ah, the trees, the trees! Oh, living climate of the living — how sweet it smells!"

It was a park.

Here, despite the point of view, we have sufficient context about what is causing the delirium that we never feel in doubt about the nature of reality, only Castorp's ability to return to it.

A final example is the opening sequence of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, in which Aomame is stuck in a traffic jam and reality begins to alter, a split occurs, and she finds herself traveling down the more hallucinatory path. Murakami shows her noticing the rupture:

Why, though Aomame wondered, has she instantly recognized the piece to be Janácek's Sinfonietta? And how did she know it had been composed in 1926? She was not a classical music fan, and she had no personal recollections involving Janácek, yet the moment she heard the opening bars, all her knowledge of the piece came to her by reflex, like a flock of birds, swooping through an open window. The music gave her a wrenching kind of feeling… Aomame had no idea what was going on. Could Sinfonietta actually be giving me this weird feeling?

In this book, a little like in beloved, the magical reality has a kind of equal status with the normative one. As readers, we have just enough distance to understand a little more than Aomame, who is confused about what is going on. We see that she is entering the divided space where two realities will coexist, and that her journey will be traverse both. My takeaway here is that while Aomame is baffled, we are not. We are, instead, eager to explore the new universe Murakami has opened up, to try to understand how it works.

PROMPT
One question to ask, when deciding how much clarity you want, regarding what's real and what's not, is about narrative distance. Another is about how much context to provide. Surprisingly, it's not entirely a POV question, as evidenced by the closeness of the Johnson and the distance of the Mann, though both are in first person. Do you want your reader swept up in the alternate reality? Then stick close to the character experiencing it and don't give clues that explain it. Do you want them watching as if from above, fully briefed on what is actually what? Then provide distance, context and explanation (it doesn't have to be scientifically verifiable!). Either way, alternate realities can be powerful tools and are common, even in realistic narratives (take drunkenness, dreams). How you use them will determine the scope and scale of your universe.