How can something be more real than reality?

Well… you can’t. Semantically, that doesn’t make sense.

And yet, people experience that all the time.

Have you ever had a dream that was more vivid and compelling than your waking state? Most dreams are not like that because you can feel your memory scramble from within the dream.

However, if you could remember them all clearly, many of them would have this strange quality. They would seem more real than reality.

I’ve had dreams like that.

You don’t have to be unconscious to experience it.

People facing certain death, at the throats of religious revelation, or simply dealing with a soul-changing epiphany often report feeling this. Suddenly their senses sharpen and they see the world as if it were the first time.

Hallucinations of any kind are like that.

However, it is strange. Why would something that is a product of your brain failing seem more real than reality?

If you ask this to any of the dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to Carl Jung, the mystique or the Secret, they will tell you that it is proof that the real world is made of thoughts. The material world, they say, is the one that is actually ephemeral.

This pretentious antics could be right, who knows, although it sounds unlikely.

But they are wrong when they call this ‘proof’ of anything.

Anything generated in the mind will always seem more real than anything generated by optic nerve signals. Of course it is: his eye is leaky, marked by scars, scratches, and random neural noise.

Vision is awesome because your brain takes some shitty input and uses it to create detailed models of the world.

But imagine generating models with a cleaner input source.

That’s what hallucinations are. You can see much more clearly when you don’t trust your eyes.

(With less precision, perhaps, but clearer…)

Those Facebook losers hate this kind of explanation, but they’ll get over it the next time someone asks “Is God truth, love, or life?” and they can prove to be as deep as the average stoned philosophy student.

But my explanation, in addition to meaning something, is much deeper than theirs.

It points out a truth about your mind that you can’t even see.

When you look around you often feel like your eyes are open doors through which the real world enters. That’s not how you work. It’s closer to taking Morse code signals and translating them into a CGI representation.

It can be helpful, it can even be accurate, but you are never seeing the true reality.

When your thoughts create a clearer picture of nothing, it can seem super real…even when it’s less real than everything else.

Your mind is so funny.

It’s one of the reasons hypnosis can be so powerful. In a trance, you may have impulses that come from somewhere other than your senses. Bubbling up from your unconscious, they can seem more real than anything else.

Some of those thoughts can be dark and primitive.

Many will appear random.

Others will have deep wisdom that you have allowed yourself to forget.

And with a skilled hypnotist, you can take whatever comes up and solve even the most difficult and stubborn problems.