On "Realism" in Fiction:

The bottom line is that I tend to think a character's "reality" consists of not only one narrow "slice" of what they're focusing on from their POV, but everything else around them being detected by their senses. If from my POV, as I am saying to you across the table, "What to you think you'll order for dessert", to term that neat, uninterrupted sentence as representing the "reality" of the speaker, OR the spoken to, is (sorry to be blunt) nonsense.  As I speak to you, I'm hearing snatches of words from other tables; I'm noticing activities occurring one after the other about the range of my eyesight, each of which is provoking a fragment or more of thought in me, simultaneous to the sentence I'm speaking. In short, as I am saying "What do you think you'll order for dessert?" my mind is churning with reaction to surrounding activity--talk,  laugher, clatter, people rushing past, etc. Much but not all of this churning is conscious, much is subconscious. Etc. But if you wanted to dig deep enough, perhaps a novel could be dug from those twenty seconds.

Also note that for each bit of stimuli butting on on my speaking, my mind is reacting some way to each thought image emotion, etc.--fleeting as these may be, and may dissolve just as fast, they are still part of my total moment to moment "reality".

The bottom line is that a truly "realistic" narrative of what's going on in my POV while asking you that question would contain and present all of that stimuli that one's skill as a writer could handle. 

What is considered tradional realism filters all out but what the writer decides the reader needs to know to achieve the end purpose of the story. Nothing wroing with that kind of stuff--but we got to see it for what it is.

What I call "non-traditional" realism filters out much less and perhaps in some cases nothing at all.

And this is not "experimental" to me at all, because all the way throught I am solidly portraying "reality." 

As a side note, I think the word "experimental" is too often tacked onto difficult work as an easy out when a description's hard to come up with, or hidden behind by incompetent or inexperienced writers who produce meaningless ("bad" even!)texts, but tack on that label to give their gibberish some validity. 

Lastly: obsession with adhering to "rules" in fiction, keeps the resultant texts synthetic and anything but "realistic"- but this does not allow chaos. Each creator, through persistent practice and hard work, will ultimately find themselves gradually observing a set of personal "rules" particular to them - and accurately expressing if not total, but something very close to, absolute reality. 

Hiccup.

"Do not live a false dream."  (anon)