Writing about another dimension

I was writing a new story where the Heroine was corrupted by an evil overlord and she proceeds to warp the whole agricultural village into yet another parallel Acid-Trip Dimension via a combination of her black-magic, which turns it into a Dark World (similar to the Witch's dimension in Puella Madoka Magica) but I have no idea of how to write this concept into words?

So what are the techniques that people use when writing about another dimension where the laws of physics isn't obeyed at all?

Note: The theme/tropes of the dimension is Nightmares, Tears from a Stone/Tears of Fear/Meat Moss and Evil Is Visceral

PS: why isn't anyone answering me?

edited 13th Jun '14 8:34:34 PM by sabrina_diamond

It takes a while to get answers on TV Tropes, I typically wait days.

To answer your questions: you don't. If you alter the laws of physics, life as we know it becomes impossible. I can't even describe why because the laws we're familiar with are what we've evolved to deal with. For example, if you were to suddenly go to a place where inertia was higher, everything becomes slower, including the blood flowing through your veins, leading to a death by very (nor not so slow) slow oxygen starvation and a possibly fatal strain on your heart as it tries to deal with blood that is suddenly much more viscous. This is a very crude example, but it gets the idea across.

A better idea IMO would be to handle the change stylistically. This world is supposed to be a Bad Place, so let's say the ambient magic feeds on the emotions brought on by emotional and physical trauma: Protag arrives in a spooky place, is a bit unnerved. Her feelings feed the ambient environment, which becomes even scarier, which makes her more scared, which causes the environment to become even more traumatic, etc.

I think that it depends somewhat on what, precisely, the effects of the place are.

You say that the laws of physics aren't obeyed at all—is that accurate, or hyperbole? Either way, are there other laws, perhaps peculiar to that world, that are obeyed? If physics isn't entirely suspended, then what, if anything, is?

To give an example, I recall reading a few descriptions set in the Planescape setting, in particular the chaotic plane of Limbo. The author there, as I recall, described such things as a creature bounding "over/through/under" (or something to that effect) the ever-shifting matter of the plane, thus conveying the lack of consistency inherent to plane of Chaos.

Ultimately, I suppose that the idea is to describe the effects of the place (without letting such description take over the work). For example, if it's characterised by floating islands that merge and break apart at random, you might have something like this:

"Above Lissie's head were innumerable chunks of rock, seemingly suspended in the air like clouds, drifting freely, and walking on them—on all sides, as though each were a miniature planet to itself—were people. As she stared, mouth open, two rocks in particular caught her eye: they were drifting slowly towards each other. She almost cried out a warning towards them before she realised that her voice would never carry so far; and breathed out again when she saw people on each point at the other and start an frantic escape from the points of impact.

All that would have been strange enough. But then the two colliding islands hit. There was no crash, no rain of stone chunks as the two great rocks smashed into each other. Instead, they seemed to... merge, the rock rippling and sticking in a way that left Lissie feeling vaguely ill. She wanted to look away from this strange coalescence, but it held her gaze. As they merged, the rocks slowed; at last they seemed to stop, and where there had been two islands there was now a single, larger one. Slowly, the people of the islands began to come out, to investigate their new situation and to greet each other."

Probably not exactly what you mean when you're talking about "dimensions", but the movie "Flatland" might be worth checking out.

It's a story about a two-dimensional world colliding with a three-dimensional one. It's not a perfect film (the interjections can be annoying) but it does a fairly good job of illustrating the concept of dimensional space. It could be useful if your interested in creating world where physics "don't work", at least to an outsider.

Maybe to add extra horror to this other parallel dimension, I should add some Meat Moss, to make it seem more nightmarish to the scenario? And I will incorporate 4 dimensions into this Dark World realm.

Thank you for the link, I will watch Flatland

edited 13th Jun '14 8:44:48 PM by sabrina_diamond

If the laws of physics are too radically changed, it's reasonable to say that a human might not be able to perceive it.

One of my favorite touches to The Salvation War was that in describing a dimensional interface they weren't shy about this; it didn't have height or width or anything in a normal sense, and humans didn't perceive it directly; they saw a black "hole" in reality because they couldn't see through the interface.