Imagine transporting into a different reality where you get lost in a mixture of free emotions, action and dangers that aren’t accessible in real life. You fall in love with new people and cry as they’re lost. The images and scents of strange new places feel so close, as if you were actually there. Many avid readers know this feeling, the sensation of falling deep into a book.
I’ve tried to express this feeling to others and realized there is no word that describes being completely submersed into a writing, at least to my knowledge. Therefore, the most sensible and reasonable explanation to fix this problem is to create a word for this feeling. I call it, novellusion! It’s the experience of losing feeling of your current state of reality and being transported into the writings of a novel.
Having a novellusion is experienced by many devoted readers. They are so in tuned with their book that all reality slips away, and they know only what’s happening inside the book. If you’ve ever walked up to someone experiencing novellusion, you might’ve noticed, it’s hard to get their attention and bring them back to reality. So if it is an emergency, like a fire, just pick up the reader and carry them outside. Disturbing the novellusion process can be met with anger from said reader and other strong reactions to being separated from their book.
If someone goes through novellusion a lot, they should be referred to as Novellusionists. They take reading very seriously and might disappear from time to time and become completely submerged into their book. They might snap out of novellusion occasionally for a food and bathroom break, but with avid Novellusionists this may be rare.
Neuroscientist Professor at Magdalen College, Oxford said, “Imagining what is happening activates the brain as if it is doing it." This would explain the feeling when people snap back to reality and have a sense of disorientation; their brain was thinking it was doing whatever the person was reading about and experiencing the actions.
In 2009, a study discovered when a person reads and imagines landscapes, tastes, smells and other senses described on the page the areas of the brain that are used to process these experiences in real life are activated. Essentially a person’s brain can feel and act like it is going through what a person is reading visually. Complete realities are composed out of 26 letter combinations and can make people laugh, cry and feel for nonexistent characters. To people who have not experienced novellusion this emotional response to text might seem absurd. But to those who experience novellusion it is an amazing discovery of emotion.
Novellusion can take an audience from one reality to another in a few pages. Simple letters can carry readers off into distant lands of floating green mountains, hovering miles above the ground. Or even deep under the pressured ocean waters, discovering the red rusted remains of a sunken pillaged ship. Novellusion can be an amazing experience, all there is to do is read.
