: Struggling to portray a character's multitude of internal experiences For one of my main characters, I use internal thinking/processing/&intuition to run counterpoint and deepen our understanding

Vote Up Vote Down

I think if you set the context clearly you can keep the dreams separate from the hallucinations. By that I mean do not have any scenes where it is unclear he is in a dream to the reader. The character doesn’t have to recognize it. By having surreal descriptions or repetitive totems in the dreams people will catch on.

The sources of subconscious knowledge will be challenging since they can feel like Deus Ex Machina solving the problem. They can easily feel like a cheat. But, as long as the subconscious knowledge is being used to move the story forward and not resolve the conflicts it would be interesting.

You can treat the hallucinations like the dreams and keep them in a clear context. Since most people have experienced a hallucination, I think it will require more of an explanation to establish it clearly.

If you have a reoccurring element associated with the experience — a woman in white, a penguin, snakes —- that emphasize their unreal nature, that way when the character experiences them, you’ll have something familiar to the reader to build your narrative on.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

I think you can easily differ between these part of the book (or whatever it is).

you can ask readers to prepare themselves for the surreal part of the story !

you can say it in the hidden way! for example create an extra character (like a speaking little ghost or something like that weird insect in Pinocchio.) then when this extra character start to talk, reader notice the main here is in the unreal world or is just think for herself in a more creative way, that he/she had to create this imaginary character to organize his/her own plans.

if it was a movie you could easily explain this unreal conditions by adding some background music or showing some vapor around the environment. since you don't have such options in writing, so adding a imaginary character can be a big help !

by the way some smart readers prefer that get confused ! your story have not be understandable by all the people on earth ! you can just write it in a confusing way, and will see there are many people understand it yet. :)

(0)