Columns:
Men with a Mission: Creating your own reality
 
 
By: Wouter van de Zandschulp

Reality.
People who are shooting each other, poverty, racism. Most fantasy-lovers almost think of reality of a bad word. People say things as: 'the awful truth' and consider 'the real life' almost a synonym of 'the hard life'. Fantasy-lovers therefore often are considered as people who flee from this hard reality.
But what is this so-called 'reality'? Is it made up to make more pulp-television, called 'reality-TV'? It seems to be something everyone considers 'the real thing'. But this is highly subjective, you would say. No one thinks the same about something. Everyone has his completely own mind, his own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. It just dazzles you. Everyone looks from his/her very own angle. Every individual is in essence alone. He can mingle, sure, but there is one person inside his body. Therefore no one can stand in the exact same place inside a room than this other person does. Then his way of thinking; it's unique too. The goals the person is after are also quite unique. Because no person can be exactly the same as another person and nothing he has gone through in live is the exact same as any other. You can make clones (perhaps in an evil plot to become all powerful or so) but you cannot make the live all through the exact same thing. They cannot even all stand in one place.
So every person has got his/her own world. This earth is a place with countless worlds. All animals and insects, they all live in their own world. So what's reality all about then? After all, you live in your private world. Hence the idea of one solid reality.
You only have to look at newspapers to find that also the assumption of reality being 'normal' is very much off. As such, the assumption that reality is 'boring' or something like that.
Then we have fantasy. A popular subject, since lots of us saw 'The Never-ending Story' when we where young. It can be seen as some sort of game, where we can relax and freely play and mix the things we see in real life, without having to worry about things being 'correct'. You can aggressively and greedy without shame take all influences live pours your way to make them your own. And you will not be arrested. Not at all. Your mind is yours. Inside yourself you can play with all that you know freely. Very relaxing.
So that makes reality what happens in relation to the others and fantasy what happens indeed to you?
A lot of questions remain about fantasy and reality though. One of the assumptions I believe in most is that fantasy is a device to help sort things out and give some sort of concrete form to something, to make it able to handle. To overcome and think about things that had happened to you, in the first place it is necessary to see it happen again. You imagine someone you have seen, but do not see at the moment. With fantasy you do the same, only you mix things you've seen to a new reality. To take a distance from what's happened, you make it easier to handle.
You make a more easy to handle reality of your own. And to accomplish your goal of handling reality's events by means of fantasy, you try and make your own fantasy world as plausible as possible. You think about a history for your fantasy characters which must be used as consequent as possible. The dream of your fantasy character being a real person must not be endangered by flaws in history. Tolkien made an entire history, maps and language for his world. So far from our own, so mystical, and yet, it does makes sense. If you see the history of Middle-Earth, it all makes sense.

So here I end with a theory. Could it be we fantasize to be able to handle the real world and make the fantasy as real as possible to be able to believe our fantasy world really does exist? Or am I making up this theory as a mind trick of my own, to make the existence of fantasy with a reason of benefit for mankind and therefore a good and logical thing to exist? By this means pulling fantasy into the reality in the fear that is does not exist?
But if this is so, doesn't that mean my theory is correct if it is correct or not?
And what if I am the only existing in the mind of... wait, that's another story. Let's not get overboard completely.
The ones who think I already have can contact me. But not between 4 and 5 AM, because then I'm subject to some more alien experiments.

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