My Year of Discovering How Weird the Mind Gets, Part XII [Narrative Transportation]

This is the belated final posted of my 2019 project on altered states of consciousness. I was traveling during the latter half of December and, hence, my tardiness.

During 2019, each month I gave special attention to studying some state of consciousness that exists outside of the normal waking state. (Of course, the folly of believing that there is one "normal waking state of consciousness" is one of the major lessons learned from this exercise.) My investigations included: meditation, hypnosis, lucid dreaming, sensory deprivation, psilocybin consumption, and various others - a number of which were variations on inducing a Flow state.

In December, because I was traveling so much I was reading even more than usual, and it occurred to me that there is a kind of reading in which the mind behaves differently from the norm. I'm not talking about all reading, but - specifically - when one gets lost in story. There's run-of-the-mill reading, and then there's the reading in which a hundred pages seem to fly by in minutes, but you realize you've lost a lot more time than that. This topic might seem like a dull ending to this project. Being absorbed in story might not appear as enthralling or "sexy" as mushroom tripping or floating in sensory deprivation tank, but the experience can be just as profound.

As I was looking into this, I discovered that there is a term that addresses what I'm talking about, "narrative transportation." Narrative transportation relates to absorption, which I learned is a factor in hypnosis. That is, how easily does one become completely mentally occupied with an object of contemplation such that one loses awareness of the passage of time and external stimuli. In this type of reading, one is mentally reconstructing the world and events of a story, and that process is demanding of one's attention. Furthermore, there is an intense emotional experience that one is feeling simultaneous to this mental construction. This doesn't leave much room for the mind to wander - if the story is intriguing enough to hold one's attention.

As a reader, one facilitates narrative transportation largely by picking stories that are appealing to one, and by finding extended time periods to read without distraction. However, what's really interesting is how a writer can facilitate this state through his or her style and method. The most commonly discussed aspects of this facilitation are: the story arc (i.e. arranging events to create and maintain excitement) and building lovable or loathsome characters (either way, just as long as they aren't tedious or boring.)

But there is another aspect that I think of as readability. How easy does the storyteller make it for the reader to create their own mental story-world? In large part, this has to do with the art of finding the Goldilocks Zone of description. If one describes too little one creates "floating head syndrome" in which the reader (if they continue reading at all) may imagine floating heads conversing in a blank white room. On the other hand, if one spends twelve pages describing the drapes or the weather, one is unlikely to keep readers engaged. Coincidentally, one of the books that I read in December that was educational (though not transportational) was Milan Kundera's "The Art of the Novel." In it, Kundera bemoans the tendency to over-describe characters such that one interferes in the reader's imaginings. He points out that readers learn almost nothing about the physical description and background of some of the most important characters in literature.

And so concludes my year of altered states as I look forward to new adventures in 2020.