fantasy or reality.

>>Well, there's no easy way to explain how Prairie could forsee the shooter's action and take the bullet at the end.

That depends on whether you buy Freudian theory of the subconscious. Her councillor told her she needed to separate her shaggy dog story from her need to understand her premonitions and just let the latter happen. She was subconsciously picking up clues from her surroundings. Perhaps I should have said "on the side of humanism." Obviously, there are aspects such as the nose bleeds that can't be known. And that's true of medical science. They don't, for instance, entirely know how some metastasis works in some cancers.

>>There's none humanist explanation for a mindboggling story told by this neurotic but open minded woman.

I thought that was explained by the councillor quite clearly. It was a need to process what had happened to her in a positive way. If you take the revelation that she had been raped as truthful then that explains her reluctance to be touched. It also explains why Hap is depicted as disinterested in her sexually but needs her as a special flower in a hugely important experiment. Another captive is forced to have sexual intercourse though which suggests there is a truth being processed but made more palatable.

Since her entire story basically was a sort of way to project her pain, what really makes this series interesting is to wonder how many parts of it were real, and what was fiction. She definitely experienced a lot of traumatizing stuff - I think that most of the stuff she tells her parents when she finally opens up to them actually are some of the real details, like being held captive in a basement and only being fed animal-food. She doesn't really tell them any of the more far fetched stuff. So most likely, her story to the gang was a sort of abstract variation of what she really experienced. Made up in a more magical way to make it more bearable for herself, where each of the members of the gang reflected some of the people she either met or made up. Plus she couldn't have carved the scars in her back herself - that was one part I never understood while I still believed her story. Most likely they were forced upon her by her captor(s).

And then there's the part about how she got her sight back. Since it was often established that she really was blind outside of her character. Perhaps her blindness, was a mental thing she developed from when she was a child, because she saw so much horrible stuff and the Russian bordel, where she probably was born, and was never raised by Russian oligarchs. The traumatic and painful things she experienced as a captive, then made her sight come back.

And to the people that are wondering how she got the books, I was mostly under the impression that they were just some of her parents random books, you see serval books at their house in many shots, and the randomness of the books, probably was it was something she just took from their shelves, just distract and occupy her mind rather than it was some specific titles she ordered online, but all the elements of the books then worked themselves into her projecting fantasies. Sort of like when a person in a psychosis can make everything in a book or a movie to be about them and their own world and thoughts.

Though the series still left you wonder a lot of things, especially how she really got back her sight, how she managed to escape, and what really happened to her.