Reality and fiction, reality and fantasy, reality and dreaming are occasionally hard to tell apart.
I may dream that I am getting up and even getting to my office… only to discover that I am still in bed, under the covers… It felt so real
I am lucky it is only on cold morning… Some people spend their lives on the border of dreaming and living.
Some books are intentionally written in a way that the reader can’t tell if it is fantasy or a skillful telling what happened.
Two books come to mind most: Anastasia, The Ringing Cedars of Russia that sold tens of millions of copies. I have them, and read them. I enjoyed them. Well written fiction, although some of it is bad as far as fiction goes.
Humanity, especially women, took every word of the book for a fact, and there are groups, quasi religious, the Anastasiasts…
The other book is Dan Millman’s book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
It’s of the same genre… fantasy is mixed with reality… skillfully, I admit.
I enjoyed that book too… but I am going to rain on some parades…
Fantasy believed is not good for you.
The followup book to The Peaceful Warrior, The Journeys of Socrates. The white haired gas station attendant in the first book is called Socrates. This book is one of my favorite books I read once a year. It could be true, except it is 99% fiction. Beautiful, moving fiction, but fiction. A likely story.
The original book is 40% fiction. The interesting part is fiction… Almost believable…
Humanity wants to, desperately wants to live a life that is NOT reality bound. Jump to spirituality, fantasy…
…because, as Freud so astutely said:
‘Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.’
Freud doesn’t say it here, but all religion, all religious ideas, belong to what he calls ‘palliative measures’. I would say they are substitutive satisfactions, as a category.
So there are more than enough writers are willing to jump on the bandwagon, and create fiction that tread the netherworld between reality and fiction, providing the much needed ‘opium of the masses’, the crutches for the weak and weak willed, the flimsy, the ragdoll.
Yes. Reality is hard.
And no one can realistically promise that life will be easy. Instead the job of a self-respecting human, maybe you? is to get strong so they can meet life as equals.
Jim Rohn, famed coach said: ‘Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. And don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom’.
Wishing won’t change anything, fantasizing won’t change anything.
I was taught early in my life that fantasizing
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