Chugga-chugga-choo-CHOO! Don’t be alarmed. That was the engaging of the brakes because we’re making a little stop at the Liminal Waystation. It’s that strange and murky in-between place where you can’t quite see past the fog and it’s impossible to tell the time. It’s a good place for catching your breath and seeing things in a slightly new light even when you can’t see them at all. Today we’re diving into the space
Between Imagination and Reality
It sounds simple enough, right? A thing is either imagined or real. It’s there or it isn’t. It exists or it’s a figment of an overactive mind.
But there’s more than meets the eye. This is literally true, as it turns out. The brain, in its effort to minimize the onslaught of information it must process for our survival, takes shortcuts. When you read, you don’t process every letter in a word. Researchers at Cambridge found that it’s only important that the first and last letter of a word be in the right place.
Don’t believe me? Put it to the test yourself here.
But wait a minute…if our brains only give us access to essential information, how much are we missing out on? Aren’t the unimportant bits reality too? Or do they cease to be reality because we do not experience them as part of our journey?
So many questions.
As it turns out, reality as we know it is subjective, filtered as it is through our brains.
Ok, so we may not see everything that exists. But what about seeing and hearing things that no one else can while being convinced of their realness? Are these episodes real because of our experience of them or are they imaginary because of our being alone in our experiencing them?
Most of us would agree that hallucinations, while real for the sufferer, are not objectively real because of their inability to be experienced by others. While their causes can be complex and varied, hallucinations can be caused by stress, grief, certain drugs, and an array of mental illnesses and physical afflictions, including schizophrenia and migraines.
Visual hallucinations are more common than auditory ones and one recent study suggests that 17-38% of the population have experienced them. That’s potentially a third of the population. And for the people experiencing them, they are very real.
The takeaway at first seems to be that if mass numbers of people experience the same thing, it’s real.
But what about the Mandela effect in which mass numbers of people become convinced of experiencing something that never happened? Fiona Broome coined the term after she experienced vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s when in fact, he didn’t die until 2013. Broome was not alone in her collective mis-remembering.
There are many other examples of lots of people remembering something erroneously, and while the reasons for this are not fully understood, the power of false memory cannot be denied.
Memory, as it turns out, is fallible. As humans, we will also get a filtered version of reality because of our finite processing capacity. And we love to fill in the blanks, taking a lot of creative license as we do so.
So, is there any hope for truly knowing reality?
The answer is science…kind of.
Science has mostly succeeded as a method of inquiry because of the development of instruments that overcome the “human problem.” Telescopes, spectrometers, probes…they all relay information that can be rendered numerically. Experiments should be repeatable by people in different parts of the world and blind studies are utilized to ensure that knowledge of the thing being studied doesn’t impact findings.
Still, scientists are human beings, and two different scientists can arrive at different conclusions after duplicating experiments and obtaining the same numerical results.
So, science helps. But it isn’t perfect. To further complicate matters, observation has been found to change findings in the quantum realm and some quantum physicists have even suggested that observation changes reality.
Great, just when we thought we were getting close to defining it…it turns out reality CHANGES every time we observe it.
Welcome to being human.
A word about imagination
Most children learn the difference between reality as we understand it and imagination by the age of 3 or 4, although the process is gradual. It should come as no surprise that this is around the age when children actively engage in imagining worlds of their own creation, pretending, and suspending disbelief. People are more or less predisposed to vivid imagination as they age.
There is general consensus that imagination served a valuable evolutionary purpose. It enabled early humans to visualize scenarios that hadn’t actually happened so that they could be prepared for them when they did.
The neocortex and thalamus control the brain’s imagination, along with many of the brain’s other functions such as consciousness and abstract thought. These latter functions are also involved in critically thinking about one’s reality.
HUH.
The confusion between real and imagined is easier to see when you realize that the same apparatus is responsible for both tasks.
There is also a lot of gray area. A thing can be mostly real with bits that are imagined or almost entirely imagined but contain a granule of truth.
Book Recommendation
Father Figure
by Dan. B. Fierce
Father Figure asks us to consider the consequences of action and inaction. It dissects the relationships most of us never question. It shows people hitting rock bottom and starting to dig, falling into the hole, and attempting to climb back out.
Father Figure does what good horror ought to do in my opinion – it makes you feel. This collection is simultaneously a beautiful tribute and a willingness to accept that we don’t always get all the answers. It is dark and twisted and real. It is barely contained madness. It is an inhospitable landscape with a river of love running through it, if only you can make your way to those shores to drink.
And at its core is a kind of ghost story called Bedside Regret, in which the narrator is visited by the spirit of his father after he lies and tells the dying man that he is not gay.
It is not clear whether the force is imagined or real and in some ways it doesn’t much matter; it is a very real experience for the narrator.
The lines between reality and imagination are blurred by grief and any resolution has to come from that wellspring of ambivalence and powerful emotion.
Writing Exercise
Imagine your favorite food and describe the way it looks, feels, tastes.
Now, go and get your favorite food and take a bite.
Describe it again.
How close did your imagination come to getting it right?
