willow and xander get buffy home, and she recounts what she saw and was told at the mental hospital; dawn is hurt when told she doesn't exist in buffy's 'ideal' alternate reality. while willow organizes a plan to research, buffy falls back to the 'reality' of the mental hospital, where her doctor explains to her parents that she has been catatonic from schizophrenia for all of the past six years (except for the brief period of lucidity which buffy dimly remembers as her time in "heaven") and that her life as the slayer has been an elaborate improvised hallucination she has constructed for herself in her mind, explaining what buffy realizes is its extreme improbability and illogicality compared to the 'mental patient' scenario.