15 for 15 Contest --- Closed

What is reality?

When you really consider it, what does it mean? Don’t we all filter our existence through our thoughts, perceptions, understandings?
So, why should one reality be more important than another?

Why should my perception be any less than yours?

Ask anyone to describe a scene, and you will discover there are as many different descriptions as there are people. Sure most of them describe similar things, but does that make it more real? 

If I could share my reality with you, would you see it as clearly as I sometimes see yours?

Reality. 

Wasn’t it Plato that said to find truth we must ignore our senses. You live in a world of lies wrapped in sensory discovery. I live in a world that transcends this.

Doesn’t this world glorify those that look outside the box?

What about me?

You can’t get more of an out-of-the-box thinker than me. You see the standard fare. I see what can be. Your life becomes sugar-coated drivel – mine is a constant adventure. It feeds my soul. It eats yours. It scares you that I see what you can’t. Easier to slap a label on me, throw me in an institution, and forget me, than to deal with the way I make you feel. Inadequate. 

Somewhere inside of you, under the moss that covers your dormant brain, do you wonder, “What if he is right? What if we are wrong? What if we are the insane ones, and he the only one who knows?” 

Do monsters exist? As a child did you not see them? Think about it. Hasn’t your perception of reality changed as you grew older? The verdant landscape of veracity beckons. It promises much. It delivers little. It entombs those who decide to embrace it. In its perception of life, it holds death.
This is your reality. 

Do we train our brains into stone? Do we lose the lucidity behind the perceived reality? Do we stagnate? Without the blessing of fresh ideas stirring our brains, do we not live in a torpid world? 

Perhaps, my world is better - a world with fresh streams and invigorating waterfalls. A world where the human spirit dips and soars through skies filled with unimaginable wonders. Flying over fields of flowers, the spirit stops not to smell them but to converse with them. A place impossible doesn’t exist. 

You want to shackle me to this – your reality.  Your drugs do this to me. They slow my mind, until it too lies in your simple plane of existence. Entrenched in the mediocrity of life, I will become one with you, undecipherable, simply another of the myriad brain sloths – moving so slowly in thought that moss covers me. 

And the worst part – the horror?

We won’t even know. 

With these medications I join your ranks, and someday, I too will forget. I will forget what can be. I will forget the open spaces. I will embrace your stagnant, moss-covered thoughts and think this is the reality.