author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

And what I want to know is, if I refer to several months of a character's memory, whose veracity the character has begun to question, as "nothing more than an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," will the average reader know what the hell I'm talking about?

I'm guessing not.

But I've killed enough darlings tonight and I'd rather like to keep this one, if only for the sake of economy. I mean, I could say, "a dream in which significant amounts of time seem to pass during the instant you start to lose consciousness in the middle of a traumatic event, like drowning, or being hanged by the neck during the Civil War, or having your bed's headboard fall on your neck." Or I could use a tidy little seven-word phrase and imply on top of that that my protagonist is very well read.

Economy, see? Cleverness! Yes!

(And I will keep telling myself that, thank you.)