That went ridiculously well. Their earlier non-far realm encounter went long so we didn't get to devote a ton of time to the far realm part, which I think helped it out. The PCs got drawn into a portal where they had to skill challenge and page 42 in order to find each other before they could work their way through the portal. The portal was a potpourri of Lovecraftian goodness which I made up on the fly. One of the players said aloud something about being trapped there forever, and I wasn't about to contradict her, which was unnerving the crap out of everyone with every failed skill roll or attempt to use a skill which didn't work. Eventually I let them know that rather than attempt a skill check of some sort, they could attempt to see the area where they were as it truly was.
This is where it got fun.
The player of the wizard decided to do this and succeeded, so I said it was the equivilent of this and showed her the picture:
(I picked it special for her, knowing that optical illusions mess with her.)
The fighter got the worse of it. Her Player has grapheme synesthesia, which manifests with numbers and colors. (The Player, not the PC.
It's a real thing. . Her brain puts certain colors and numbers together as the same thing. So for example, she sees the number 4 as blue.) So when I showed her a picture of a bunch of numbers colored randomly, she literally recoiled from it. The other players didn't get to see what they were seeing, which just added to the fun. Once they got through, I went with Pope Nag's idea of the blank white space and ended the session by plunking down a beholder mini in front of them and said, "see you next week"
I love this game, sometimes.