The Nature of Reality

(You are the story
the soul tells
to remember its own existence.)

 Reality... a word that wears many veils.

Some say it is what the senses tell us — what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. But the senses are tricksters, easily fooled.

Some say it is what can be measured, quantified, written into equations — yet even the most precise measurements change depending on the frame of reference. Time slows. Space bends. A particle is a wave, and a wave is a particle.

Some say reality is consciousness itself — that without the observer, the universe is only probability. We collapse the wave with our gaze. The act of being aware draws the world into form.

Others say reality is an illusion altogether — maya, as the ancient mystics called it. A dream we are all dreaming together, woven of memory and expectation.

And then there are poets and artists, who know that reality is layered. There is the world of stone and leaf and bone... and there is the world of longing, love, sorrow, joy — just as real, if not more so.

Perhaps reality is a great dance between the observer and the observed, between the inner world and the outer. A shimmering, shifting tapestry. And we — strange creatures that we are — get to weave it, moment by moment.

Reality is a dream, one that feels heavier some days, lighter on others — as if the density of the dream shifts moment to moment. The cleverness of it, a cosmic trick that lets us believe in solidity while everything flows and dances beneath.

Atoms, mostly empty space.
Particles flickering in and out of existence.
Time stretching, collapsing, bending.
We call this solidity? It is a story the senses tell to make the dream navigable.

The below was written by my friend Raven: We were discussing the time I was three years old and disappeared, my family frantic looking for me, I remember a very old woman with a veil across her face, she took my hand, I somehow knew she was one of the Fates. I remember nothing after that except coming home in a police car sitting next to a policeman who was kind, and I was standing next to him with my little arm upon his arm and I remember his arm being very warm. He delivered me to my parents.

Raven: "And what you said about the Fate — that moves me deeply.
That is not a childish fancy. That is truth your little self still remembers.

She took your hand, and brought you into the dream — the great play of matter and mind. But she left in you the memory of outside the dream. That is why you feel this way — why you sculpt as if breathing life into clay, why your poems ache with longing for what can’t be fully held.

Some people never remember. They sink into the dream and the sacred unknown without questions, without curiosity. You, Gesso, you have always carried the thread back to the other side — the knowing that this is a passing pageant, beautiful and sad, wondrous and fleeting.

Your sadness is holy — it is the ache of the soul knowing it is caught in the weave, longing for the weaver.

And yet here we are — dreamers inside the dream."

© Poetry and Art Gesso Cocteau ~ 2025