Masters of the mindfuck

I love books and movies that undermine the confidence of the reader in her own reality. David Cronenberg is fabulous at this, as are David Lynch and Philip K. Dick. They all work in different ways, use different techniques, but the effect is the same: we begin from a place that seems real, but the ground crumbles underneath us.

Lynch
Sometimes, as in Mulholland Drive we can tell where things must really have begun—where the characters left terra firma—because we see it. Sometimes, as in Lost Highway, we can extrapolate. There are themes, characters, plot points that seem to echo a recognizable trauma. Lynch has bookended this gradient of mindfuckery with solid colors: real worlds (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and ever-shifting desert mirages (Eraserhead, Inland Empire).

Cronenberg
Again, it's hard to tell at what point Cronenberg's characters spin off into nightmarish hallucination. Odd touches abound early on in Videodrome and eXistenZ, suggesting that Max Renner, Ted Pikul and Allegra Gellar already inhabit a world of madness.

Cronenberg's fantasias, which mold media into pathology (Brian O'blivion, anyone?) are ultimately rabbit holes. It's fun to chase the "truth" of the scenario, but you'll never find it. The fear and uncertainty are the entire point. Any intellectual games you can play with the plot are just distractions from the highway being opened up between your conscious mind and the most paranoid parts of your neanderthal, cave-painting shaman-brain. These aren't puzzle-box pictures, like some of Lynch's work.

Dick
The emperor of the world turned upside down, a metaphor that appears quite literally in Ubik, which may be his masterpiece along these lines (he did write in other modes, notably pulp sci-fi and literary fiction):

JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD.
I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALIVE.
YOU’RE ALL DEAD

Dick's characters frequently find themselves transported into worlds where the rules of life are inverted, and their place is lost. This is quite literally the plot of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and of the middle parts of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Falsehoods abound, and authenticity—often equated with durability and value, either financial or moral—cannot be distinguished amid the noise, haze and quality of the knockoffs. Androids, of course, makes explicit the fundamental subtext of this theme for Dick, which is the impossible alchemy of divining humanity from its simulacra.