: Think about how dream-like or drugged states are portrayed--hazy, halting, illogical. Nothing in an imagined state is solid; time skips around, scenery/environment changes very quickly, people

@Candy753

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Think about how dream-like or drugged states are portrayed--hazy, halting, illogical. Nothing in an imagined state is solid; time skips around, scenery/environment changes very quickly, people and faces morph into other people and things.

Now compare this to the reality of the monster your character encounters. They may have a moment of, "Wait, is this another hallucination?" before coming to a realization that, no, this is very much a real thing that is happening and they need to run.

What I'm advising is, instead of letting the reader decide what's real or outright telling them what's real, have the character struggle to decide what's real and, through observation, come to a conclusion. Use the character's past experiences with the sensation of an out-of-body experience or hallucination to aid the character's realization, and then use that knowledge in the rest of the story's context--perhaps the character can now realize when they're inside a hallucination, or they can now lucid dream.

Have fun with your story, and remember that not everything has to be explained to a tee. This isn't CinemaSins, we aren't going to ding you for not throwing the information in the faces of the readers/viewers!

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