Back to Reality
Snap Judgment
Snap Judgment and PRX
4.7 • 11.5K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A woman wakes up in a hospital bed with no idea why she’s there. Her perception of reality is questionable. A doctor discovers a possible source for her delusions and what follows is her journey to recovery and back to herself.
Thank you to Susannah Cahalan for sharing your story with us! Susannah tells the full tale of her descent into madness and rise out of it in her international bestselling memoir Brain on Fire. She's written a new book called The Acid Queen, about the reality-bending world of psychedelics. You can find Susannah on IG @suscahalan.
Our friends at The Pulse will be continuing Susannah's story this coming week, as she investigates one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time... and discovers something incredible. You'll want to catch that on the next episode of WHYY's The Pulse, available on the NPR podcast feed.
Produced by Justin Kramon, edited by Nancy Lopez, engineering by Boen Wang, music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Season 16 - Episode 57
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| 0:00.0 | Snap Studios |
| 0:07.0 | Snapas, today we have an episode about a whole different type of returning. |
| 0:14.0 | We're calling it back to reality. |
| 0:18.0 | Now, for today's story, I want you to imagine that scene in your favorite thriller. |
| 0:23.6 | The one where the hero wakes up and has no idea where they are or how they got there, |
| 0:29.6 | who their friends are, and all sorts of bizarre memories keep popping up. |
| 0:34.6 | What if that scene was real and if that scene was real? And if that character was you? How'd you start to put |
| 0:42.3 | your world back together? Wider, Susanna Cahalan. She found out. Except judgment. |
| 0:49.9 | What do you like remember from that time? It was dark. |
| 0:55.7 | I couldn't really make out if there were other people in the room, |
| 0:58.7 | but I could hear the sounds of footsteps. |
| 1:01.6 | I smelled something chemical. |
| 1:04.5 | I saw a curtain, a green curtain. |
| 1:08.0 | It was on all sides of me, around me. |
| 1:10.7 | I also remember of this sensation that my head was itchy. |
| 1:16.1 | I remember that there was a camera, two cameras trained on me. |
| 1:24.9 | I couldn't really remember what had brought me there. |
| 1:28.1 | It was like a blankness that came before. |
| 1:32.9 | All I knew is that I wanted to get out any way that I could. |
| 1:38.0 | I couldn't get my arms to move because they were restrained. |
| 1:41.5 | I could not get out of my bed. |
| 1:52.0 | There was someone sitting there beside the bed who was observing me but not saying anything. And I said the words, help me. |
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