Manx- Inscape Explanation

  “Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”
...

  “So my bridge is imaginary.”

  “Not when you’re on your bike. Then it’s real. It’s an inscape pulled into the normal world.”

  “But your Scrabble bag. That’s just a bag. It’s not really like my bike. It doesn’t do anything obviously imposs—”

  But as Vic spoke, Maggie took up her bag, unlaced the strings, and shoved her hand in. Tiles scraped, clattered, and clicked, as if she were pushing her hand down into a bucket of them. Her wrist, elbow, and upper arm followed. The bag was perhaps six inches deep, but in a moment Maggie’s arm had disappeared into it up to the shoulder, without so much as putting a bulge in the fake velvet. Vic heard her digging deeper and deeper, into what sounded like thousands of tiles.
...

  “Big old hole in reality,” Maggie said. It now looked as if her left arm had been removed at the shoulder, and the amputation was, for some reason, capped by a Scrabble bag. “I’m reaching into my inscape to get the tiles I need. Not into a bag. When I say your bike or my tiles are a knife to open a s-s-slit in reality, I’m not being, like, metaphorical.”

- The Librarian: The Library