Time for a Reality Break

by Michael Sadoff

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In November 1991, I made the dumb decision to inhale nitrous oxide from a balloon while I was tripping on LSD. The Jerry Garcia Band had concluded their set at Hampton Coliseum, and we were in the parking lot after the show. The gas induced a psychotic episode. I heard a voice in my head and had a paranoid delusion. Fortunately, it only lasted a minute or two, but I remember it all in excruciating detail.

This experience later became one of the inspirations for my MFA thesis, a novel about a person with schizophrenia. I was too inexperienced to understand how hard it would be. I needed to bring hallucinations to life, write dialogue for imaginary voices, and create tangible wants and needs. I had to balance the character’s fractured consciousness with the reader’s essential and reasonable need to understand and care.

It’s an extreme example, a ten out of ten on the scale of weirdness, complexity, and “don’t try this stunt at home” disclaimers, but what about more limited breaks from reality?

Any person can slip from reality a little bit or a lot, temporarily or permanently, for many reasons. People abuse drugs, suffer from PTSD, or live in denial about a partner’s abusiveness. The very young or very old may not understand what’s happening around them. The neurodivergent may succumb to obsessions and fascinations that make less sense to the neurotypical.

If your protagonist gets hit in the head with a soccer ball and suffers a concussion, the scene isn’t believable unless confusion ensues. The soccer field spins or wobbles, voices seem far away, ears ring, or the character doesn’t know or recognize where they are. Something truly surreal and confusing could happen, and they may be unable to sort it out later. How do you adhere to this experience without abandoning readers — or having them abandon you?

One suggestion is to distance your narrator from the character’s confusion. You might choose an omniscient narrator who can evenhandedly say what’s real and what’s not. You could shift into the minds of secondary characters who can observe, react, and serve as foils.

The most important suggestion is to plan your foils. The narrator may serve, but more often it’s other characters whose perspectives contrast the fractured POV and clue the reader into what’s happening. Maybe it’s a dual narrative that alternates between perspectives or differing versions of events, allowing the reader to decipher what both people in their own cracked or skewed ways get wrong.

Either way, readers must agree to the terms. If you mislead or confuse them deliberately, they must know it’s deliberate and either trust you’ll reveal the truth or accept that objective truth is unknowable. Learning how to build and maintain this trust is critical to handling any confused or deluded POV, whether you’re dealing with a hairline fracture or a total break.

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