REALITY????? FANTASY???

A few days ago, my friend and I had an argument. We argue a lot, I agree, but this argument led to me to think about meaningful stuff. He had started it by complaining that I lived too much in fantasy and that I should learn to live more in reality. He then claimed that he too used to live in fantasy but then circumstances made him take a reality check…now he finds reality more exciting (sounds cynical doesn’t he? A line that I once wrote comes to my mind."When we take flights of fantasy, reality is the gravity that brings us crashing back to the ground.") Well here is my question. How do you draw the line between reality and fantasy? How do you know that anything that you see around you is actually real? This is the question that plagues me the most, especially after my accident when I suffered from amnesia for a few hours. Those hours were terrifying. I had no clue of the day or the year it was or how old I was. I just woke up from darkness into the bright lights of the hospital and had no clue how I got there. After that I have always wondered if I had actually woken up that day. What if I am still in a coma and all this is just a figment of imagination? Sounds scary but it could be the truth. What is even scarier is that we have no clue what reality is; we just think we do. What if all our lives, the world we live in is just a figment of somebody’s imagination. Or like in Sophie’s World, we are just characters in a book, born out of a person’s imagination, our lives being directed by the strokes of a pen. But lets leave that aside. Let us assume for a minute that what we think is reality, is indeed so. Then the question I put forward still remains to be answered. How do you draw the line between reality and fantasy? My aforementioned friend believes that there is a clear distinction between reality and fantasy even though he seems to dwell a lot on the phenomenon of psychosomatics. Contradictory beliefs? Personally my motto has always been I am because I think I am. A clear case of psychosomatics, wouldn’t you agree? I am intelligent because I believe I am intelligent. I have always been lucky because deep down in my heart I believe I am lucky. I know I have the powers to make things happen because I have a strong faith in the powers I possess in spite of all the smirks and sniggers. So when what you believe, what you dream can influence your reality, then how can you demarcate between the two. Roald Dahl said, “Those who do not believe in magic shall never encounter it.” Profound words that influence my life the most. In Harry Potter books there is a line that says that muggles will go to any lengths to ignore magic even when its right under their nose. Its all about opening your mind to infinite possibilities, to not restrict your life within the confines of a reality that we are not even sure exists, to look at life through a different perspective….because life is just your perspective of things around you. And fantasy just makes reality more fun, more bearable, even at its horrific worst(as portrayed in the movie Life is beautiful). The thing that we claim is reality is analogous to plain bread and fantasy to raspberry jam. if you eat only jam you are going to get sick and if you eat only bread, well its just boring and quite unpalatable. But to enjoy it the most, you have to mix these two, to have a layer of raspberry jam sandwiched between the bread. Because we have just only life and we have to make the best of what we’ve got. And didn’t Dumbledore say ,” Of course its all in your head but what makes it any less real?” So while there are people out there eating plain bread, I am gorging on jam sandwiches.