The “Truth” of Fiction
Fiction writers do it all the time. And assuming they’re successful, as readers we “buy” their fabricated reality as if it were true.
As long as they’re psychologically credible, we emotionally identify with the author’s characters; the sights, sounds, and scenes they depict; and their narrative structures generally. We gladly enter—and subject ourselves to—a world calculated to mimic our own.
In so many ways their fictive universe so resembles the one we inhabit that we’re induced to laugh, cry, and vicariously experience an enormous miscellany of emotions. Whatever illusions have been painstakingly contrived by the writer become ours as well.
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Your Fantasies as They “Impersonate” Your Reality
Analogously speaking, if in your mind’s eye, you can persuasively conjure up an image of your desire, then—as in, seeing is believing—it can simulate reality and, in a sense, take you there.
The main thing is to give your imaginings enough time for the fantasy to so engross you that almost literally it metamorphoses into your reality.
Paradoxically, with such a procedure your body and brain are prepared to go along with, well, what’s not really real.
In this respect it might be compared to healthy daydreaming—when, that is, it’s not motivated by the sole purpose of avoiding or escaping reality (Seide, 2024).
We can also speak of the “mind’s ear.” Have you ever tried to remember someone’s voice and after a few seconds you could hear it inside you? And when that happened, did it not feel authentic? (Wiktionary, 2024)
Imagination is a powerfully influential phenomenon and without going into its hormonal bonuses, people don’t employ it often enough, or fully enough, to experience its practical benefits.
So if a particular person’s company calms you down, or cheers you up, can you imagine their in-person presence when in fact they can’t physically be there?
Cultivating the ability to fantasize their presence—with their favorable attributes of understanding, compassion, trustworthiness, and support—has to be the next best thing to their being close by.
If you’re imaginative enough to visualize their intervening on your behalf at times when their very “beingness” would be invaluable, you’ve achieved something not always possible in reality.
Moreover, perceiving their abiding confidence in you helps foster greater self-confidence.
It all relates to self-hypnosis. And one well-known example would be the unusually effective self-relaxation technique of autogenic training. Here you’re silently repeating statements such as, “My arms and legs feel warm and heavy,” as a creative way of artificially inducing this pleasant, calming physical state (e.g., Lindberg, 2020).
And that’s just one way of replacing uncomfortable feelings of tension or anxiety with a calmness that may have eluded you earlier.
Erotic imaginings work similarly. Here, you can prompt warm, welcome feelings of connectedness, physical intimacy, sexual excitement, and positive hormonal changes by fantasizing a relationship that’s offered you these benefits in the past.
You can create such a narrative about a person who’s revealed no romantic interest in you at all. Or, indeed, someone you’ve never even met. This can be seen as a kind of wish fulfillment when reality can’t provide you with what you want, regardless of how desperately you may crave it (Stephanides, 2022).
Curiously, what can’t take place externally can yet be arranged to exist dynamically within you.
Perhaps the best example of how fantasy is at times to be revered is when a dearly beloved one has passed. As part of productively, and self-reassuringly, grieving their absence, you can affirmatively talk to them and—much more than this—“hear” them lovingly respond to you. As stated by Mitch Albom in his bestselling memoir Tuesdays With Morrie, “Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
This is how constructing and actively engaging in an alternative reality can offer you relief from real life when that life can’t be anywhere as pleasing, fulfilling, or anxiety-alleviating as you’d prefer it to be.
© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
