Stories as Simulations: How Writing Lets Us Experience Alternate Realities
“Reality is created by the mind, we change our reality by changing our mind.” -Plato
In the quiet act of reading, something extraordinary happens. The eyes move across ink on a page and somehow the mind becomes a theater, a landscape, an entire world. We feel what isn’t happening to us. We care about people who don’t exist. We immerse ourselves in places we’ve never been, or that never could be. Stories don’t just entertain; they simulate realities.
This is the secret power of writing: it allows us to experience what is impossible to live.
The Brain Doesn’t Distinguish Much Between Real and Imagined
Modern cognitive science has shown that when we imagine an action—running, tasting, feeling pain—many of the same neural pathways activate as when we experience it. This means a well-written story isn’t just processed intellectually; it is run like a simulation.
When we read a character walking through a storm, our brain triggers the sensory systems associated with cold, wet discomfort. When we follow a protagonist through heartbreak, our emotional systems mirror those feelings. Empathy is not abstract. It is embodied.
Writers leverage this biological quirk every time they choose the right detail, the right pacing, the right emotional beat. They orchestrate neural activity. They guide readers through virtual lives.
Stories Let Us Test-Drive Lives We’ll Never Live
One of the oldest theories about storytelling is that it allows societies to share knowledge, danger, and experience safely. A hunter can learn from another’s mistakes without being gored by the same boar. A young person can understand betrayal, leadership, or love long before facing them in real life.
Today, we do this through novels, screenplays, fanfiction, memoirs, and even short social posts. Fiction becomes a sandbox where we can experiment with choices, identities, cultures, and worlds without risk. We can ask:
What if I lived in a different era?
What if I made a different moral choice?
What if the rules of physics were different?
Through story, we run simulations of our fears and fantasies, our potential futures, our alternate selves.
Language Is the Engine of the Simulation
A story’s world is made of words, but those words do more than describe—they activate. Language cues the reader’s mind to build scenes, emotions, and sensations.
Concrete nouns anchor us: the chipped mug, the rough wool coat.
Strong verbs propel action: she slammed, he stumbled, the sky cracked.
Sensory detail enriches immersion: a metallic taste, a flickering neon sign, the hiss of distant tires.
Point of view filters reality, deciding what matters and what doesn’t.
The more intentional the language, the more vivid the simulation.
But this doesn’t mean writers must chase photographic realism. In fact, the simulation works best when detail is selective, evocative, and purposeful. The reader fills in the rest, and their imagination is often more powerful than exhaustive description.
Fiction Creates Emotional Reality, Not Literal Reality
The truth of a story isn’t measured by factual accuracy but by emotional plausibility. A dragon may not be real, but grief is. A time machine may be impossible, but regret is universal.
What readers want is not the real world recreated but the real feeling of being alive. Fictional realities often feel sharper, more distilled, more meaningful than daily experience because they are structured around emotion and consequence.
Writers build simulations tuned to what matters most.
“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
-C.S. Lewis
Stories as Shared Dreaming
A story is a simulation that runs in both the writer and the reader. The writer encodes an experience into language; the reader decodes it, reconstructing a world inside their own mind. Two imaginations align across time and space.
It’s a kind of shared dreaming: one person imagines, another person inhabits that imagination. And through this connection, stories can shift perspectives, challenge assumptions, and even change lives.
The Responsibility of the Simulator
When writing creates reality—even temporarily—it shapes how readers think about the world. Stories influence empathy, identity, memory, and belief. They can reinforce or dismantle biases. They can inspire change or justify harm.
Writers, then, are not just storytellers. They are world-builders, experience-designers, simulation architects. The tool is simple—words—but the effect is profound.
Conclusion: The Worlds We Make Matter
When we say that stories let us escape, what we really mean is that they let us enter somewhere else—someone else. They give us access to alternate realities where we can explore the human condition from new angles.
Writing is more than communication. It is simulation. It is the quiet technology of imagination, capable of transporting us to worlds that never were, yet feel unmistakably real.
And every time we write, we build another doorway.
