Creating one’s own reality is called imagination – that is the faculty of dreaming. In the night, you create so many things in your dreams. And the most amazing thing is that your whole life you have been dreaming every night, and you know every morning that it was a dream – not real. But when the night comes again, and you fall asleep and your imagination starts spreading its wings, no doubt arises in you – without any doubt you accept its reality.
This faculty of imagination can function in other ways also. It creates your dreams – which you know are not real. But when they come, and you are surrounded by them, they appear absolutely real – more real than the real world. Because in the real world once in a while you can suspect, you can doubt. For example, this very moment you are capable of doubting whether what you are seeing here or hearing here is real, or you have fallen asleep and you are seeing a dream. It can be a dream. You will know only when you wake up.
This is the only distinction: in reality, you can doubt – it could be a dream – but in a dream you cannot wonder if it is a dream…that’s the only distinction between dream and reality. Reality allows you reason, imagination does not allow you reason.
The same faculty can create daydreams…you are just sitting silently, not doing anything, and a dream starts floating in your eyes; you are awake but you start thinking about being the president of the country. Because you are awake, an undercurrent knows that you are having stupid ideas; but still they are so sweet that one goes on dreaming that one has become a world conqueror, or the richest man in the world. He’s awake, but he’s creating a dream. If this becomes too much, you lose your sanity. You can go into any madhouse, any psychiatric hospital, and you will be surprised how people are living in their imaginations: talking to people who are not there – not only talking, but even answering from their side – and there is no doubt, no skepticism.
Once a young boy was brought to me. His parents were very much disturbed; they had taken him to psychoanalysts, to other doctors, but nothing had worked. And his problem was not very great, but it was disturbing his whole life and his whole future. He had got this idea that while he was sleeping – he used to sleep with his mouth open – two flies had entered his mouth, and they were going around inside his body. Now they are here, now they are there, now they have moved towards the head. The whole day the boy could not do anything else, there was no way to get rid of those two flies.
He was examined, there were no flies. And even if you swallowed two flies, they could not go on moving this way. There are no superhighways like this, that the flies are going to the head, and to the feet, and to the heart, and to the stomach, and they are continuously going around and buzzing…he could hear their buzz. And how could he remain at ease? Even in the night he could not sleep well.
When the parents brought him to me they must have taken him to many people already. Somebody suggested that perhaps I might be of some help. I listened to the story and I said to the parents, “You are absolutely wrong, and the boy is absolutely right.”