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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48112
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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!

Original score: 2