How to get a real signal from complex ifft values?
You can plot the real and imaginary components from the FFT result separately (or the magnitude and the phase results separately, as two plots).  Then you can recombine the data from the two plots into a complex spectrum required to do a reconstruction IFFT.  Both components are required, otherwise you've thrown away half the information about your signal, and can't reconstruct it (unless the original signal was purely symmetric or purely anti-symmetric to begin with).

The plot data isn't really doubled when you do two plots because the result of an FFT of strictly real inputs in conjugate symmetric.  Thus you can create the input for your reconstruction IFFT from only the first half of the data for the real plot and for the imaginary plot (by conjugate mirroring it to the other half).