According to Marling, who co-created the show, the premise was actually based on a real-life encounter she had with a stranger at a party who said she’d died and come back to life. “She just seemed to be operating at a different frequency. When she told me she had a near-death experience — and described leaving her body and what she felt inside herself on the return — you understand why she felt like a person who was both apart from the world, but also more deeply in it,” she told The Associated Press in 2016. “The idea of a character like that became really appealing.” And just like that, the idea of Prairie’s story in The OA’s wild universe was conceived.