Your Reality

The time-old question, "What is reality?" remains partly unanswered. Imagine a world with no concept of what is and what isn't, a world entirely of your own creation. A world where the only limits that exists are those that you place upon yourself. Now, what's to say this isn't the world we find ourselves in?

It's not uncommon for people to lose their sense of reality. Many people begin to slip into a delirium of complacency and question what's real; many times all that remains in their minds is what isn't. The stress of everyday life leaves people in a sort of cycle, a system that starts every day and ends one.

Reality could be defined as the state or quality of existence, the resemblance to what exists, events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is real things, facts or events taken as a whole. It is a state of affairs, the reality of the business world, or just simply vacationing to escape reality. In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they appear or might be imagined.

Modal realism is the view, that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. In other words, this world could be regarded as only one among an infinite set of reasonably possible worlds, some 'closer' to the actual world and some more distant.

Dreams remain that one bridge between reality and illusion; they have been seen as a connection to the unconscious. The events of dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming where the dreamer is self-aware.

'Once Z dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Z. Suddenly he woke and there he was, solid and unmistakable Z. But he didn't know if he was Z who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Z.'

Other external stimuli affect the complex fabric of reality. Meaning your perception of reality could be altered by a drug's influence, for instance. Psychedelic drugs have the means to affect our perception of the world around us. They can confuse the senses or change them in a way so things become more intense. A good example of this is known as Dissociation.

Everyone has periods when dissociations occur naturally and, usually, unconsciously. We often drive a familiar route, and arrive with no memory of the journey or what we were thinking about.

Although we can never truly know just where we are really until we are finally awoken from this dream we call life; the point is that we are here anyway, in the present. If we weren't, we'd be somewhere else instead.