Alternate Realities

deliria, intoxications, dreams, ghosts & the uncanny

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…forced by her to act against his will. The reader knows that Beloved is an incarnation of the baby who died, and knows 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."

It “woke … Paul D himself”? So, was Paul D only dreaming, or was the visit real? The passage 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 Red Heart 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 after Georgie Identifies the drive-in. As a result, we get to experience the transcendent feeling along with the narrator.

In the Morrison scene, Paul D does not understand at first the Beloved is controlling him. He seems to be engaging the simple, if sleazy act of cheating on Sethe with Beloved. Paul D, feels guilty for his lust but not (initially) afraid. The reader, who already knows Beloved is a vengeful ghost, is fearful for Paul D before he knows to be afraid himself. What will she do to him? In the Johnson drive-in scene, the reader is swept up in the transcendent perceptions of the protagonist, and experiences his wonder. The vision of the angels seems real, till Georgie’s comment shatters it. Remarkably, though, the wonder isn't quite extinguished when the vision turns out to be just a movie shown at a drive-in. Though evanescent, the transformative, expiating effect of this angelic epiphany persists. The narrator is on his way to redemption. 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. He's so cold his left leg feels wooden and he feels "pulled to lie down in the snow." He begins to lose consciousness and to see an alternate reality.

"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.

In this passage, we know very well that Castorp is delirious and never believe in the vision of the park ourselves. Despite the first-person point of view, we do not share Hans Castorp’s sense relief or relaxation. Instead, we fear for his survival.

In Chapter 11 of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator awakens in a medical ward after being injured in a paint-factory explosion. He initially imagines his pain and injuries will be treated. Instead, he is subjected to electro-convulsive shocks, not for therapeutic but experimental purposes. By the end of the ordeal, he doesn’t know his own name or his mother’s or who he in fact is. The concealment of his name from the reader is a critical theme throughout the book, of course, a manifestation of his invisibility — but here, even the narrator himself can’t even recall it. His mind has been temporarily wiped clean. Ironically, it is through this violence that he is freed from fixed false beliefs, received ideas and self-hating preconceptions. He had been lost in a “vast whiteness,” but now, finally, he understands that “We are all human.” The ECT triggers a kind of psychic reboot, after which he is finally able to assert his own worth, identity and, indeed, importance. “I am what I am,” he says, in the words of the Burning Bush. The altered state, torment by a devil though it may have been, has transformed and empowered him.

For a final example, let’s consider 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 1Q84, a little like in Beloved, the magical reality has a co-equal status with the normative one. As readers, we have a little distance from Aomame. Whereas she is confused about what is going on, we see that she is entering a liminal space where two realities coexist, and that her journey will traverse both. But we are not that far ahead of her. If Aomame is baffled, we’re only a little less so, and the desire to comprehend is a invitation to the reader, an enticement to explore the new universe Murakami has opened up, to try to understand its logic, its ontology, how it works, to determine the boundaries of what is “Real.”

PROMPT
One decision to make, when working with alternate realities of any sort, is how much clarity you want, regarding what's real and what's not. Narrative distance — that is, the distance of the narrator from the action, and the level of insight that narrator has on the story—can greatly impact the reader’s understanding. If you want your reader swept up in the alternate reality, as confused, deceived or oblivious as your character, then stick close to the character and don't give context or clues that explain what’s what. If you want your reader watching as if from above, fully briefed, then provide distance, context and explanation. Either way, alternate realities can be powerful tools and are common. How you use them will determine the scope and scale of your universe.