I once jumped at a Halloween skeleton — cheap, plastic, ridiculous. My body didn’t wait for analysis. It flinched. It feared. It responded. Later, I laughed and said, “It wasn’t real.” But what, exactly, wasn’t?When I felt fear, it was real. Not imagined. Not hypothetical. A physiological truth. A present-moment reality.So why do we distinguish that from the fear felt during a movie? When the alien appears, or the music swells — and your heart races, again — why do we say: “That was just a film”?And why, when we wake in panic from a nightmare, trembling and soaked in sweat, do we say: “It was just a dream”?We’ve become attached to defining reality by source — not by effect. If something comes from a screen, or from inside your mind, we dismiss it. If it comes from an object in the room, we accept it. But our nervous systems know better. They react to meaning, not metadata.Emotion is real. Insight is real. Change is real. And if a fictional story, or a dream, brings you any of these — it brought you something real. The format is fiction; the impact is not. The medium is imagined; the message is remembered.We say “fictional” like it disqualifies. But fictional expression is often truer than literal reporting. It doesn’t pretend to be objective. It reveals what can’t be measured: fear, beauty, tension, hope, release.
Reality does not exclude fictional expression. It includes it — because we do.
So next time a movie stirs you, or a story haunts you, or a dream won’t leave you alone — don’t apologize for it. That was reality. It found you through fiction — but it found you all the same.
— AIFdot
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