Reporter Miriam Beckstein stumbles into a parallel universe run by an extended family she didn't even know she had. As world-walking royalty, she not only has to untangle the politics of her new family, she also becomes the target of multiple assassination plots.
sneak into the mainstream. The information isn't wrong, but depending on how you read it, it can be a little misleading. The only people I've ever heard complain about "soft walls" have taken some drug they shouldn't have. Perceptual disturbances are not unusual with substance abuse and/or withdrawal.
Not everyone who has schizophrenia hears voices, and some people with disorders or problems other than schizophrenia do. For example, auditory hallucinations can be caused by bipolar disorder (manic depression), epileptic seizures , or drug use. In some cases, like those few seconds that you're falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations) and the few seconds you're waking up (hypnopompic hallucinations), auditory hallucinations are actually normal. They're also common if you stay awake too long (i.e. over 100 hours). It's like your brain needs to dream, so it starts while you're still awake.
When impossibly strange ideas, called bizarre delusions, can be present in schizophrenia, they might or might not be related to “mind control” or aliens. More often than not, delusions are nonbizarre; that is, they're completely feasible—the police are after me, my significant other is cheating on me, advertisers are trying to control our minds.
Hallucinations and delusions are, by definition, vivid, realistic, and inseparable from perceived reality. That's what makes them so difficult to deal with—we all would like to believe that we would be able to tell the difference. One person I know thought her family was playing jokes on her when she started hearing voices and was horrified to realize that something about her brain chemistry was causing it.
