You wake up. The room feels familiar. The air carries the scent of morning. Light spills through the window—(excluding those in the UK, where the clouds guard the sun like a jealous lover)—stretching across the floorboards. You sit up, feeling the weight of your body, the coolness of your skin. Everything is as it should be.

But for a moment—just a fleeting moment—you hesitate. What if none of this is real?

Not because it is an illusion. Not because you are trapped in a dream. But because reality does not exist until you create it.

Plato would have called it the cave—a world of flickering shadows mistaken for truth. He imagined prisoners, chained from birth, facing a wall where distorted reflections danced before them. To these prisoners, the shadows were reality. They knew nothing else. Until one day, a prisoner breaks free. He stumbles out of the cave and into the overwhelming brightness of truth. For the first time, he sees what has always existed beyond the illusion.

But what if he wasn’t seeing something that was hidden? What if he was creating it in the very act of seeing?

Descartes wrestled with this very question centuries later. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. But what if I create, therefore it is is a more accurate statement? If thought is the only certainty, then why assume reality is fixed? If the mind can dream a world in sleep so vividly that we believe it is real, what makes us think it is not doing the same when we are awake?

Neuroscience tells us perception is not passive. Your brain does not receive reality; it constructs it. The red of an apple? That colour does not exist in the external world. The warmth of the sun? Just electrical signals interpreted in your mind. You are not experiencing a pre-existing world. You are projecting a world outward, layering meaning onto raw data, shaping the formless into form.

And if that is true, then what is real?

Modern physics bends the question even further. The observer effect suggests that matter does not take form until it is observed. Before being measured, particles exist in a state of probability, neither here nor there, both here and there. Meaning consciousness does not just perceive reality—it determines it. Nothing is solid until attention gives it structure. The moment you look, you collapse possibility into fact.

So what if reality is not something external at all? What if it is waiting for us to bring it into being?

The mistake has always been assuming that the world is happening to us. That we are placed inside some pre-built structure, playing out lives in a universe that already exists. But what if the opposite is true? What if there is no world unless we think it into existence? No future unless we project it forward? No time, no space, no boundaries—only the consciousness that gives rise to it all?

Simulation theory asks whether we are living in a programmed reality, but what if we are not in a simulation—what if we are the programmers? If the world is shaped by attention, then nothing is preordained. No laws of fate. No rigid paths. Just infinite potential, waiting to be selected, waiting to be shaped, waiting to be made real through the act of conscious choice.

Nietzsche spoke of the will to power, the force that shapes existence, the drive to create meaning rather than find it. But even he did not go far enough. It is not just meaning that is created—it is existence itself. If reality is created in the mind, then existence is not something to be accepted. It is something to be authored.

And yet, if we are so powerful, why do we feel trapped? Why do we repeat the same cycles, attract the same patterns, live lives that seem to unfold in ways beyond our control?

Because reality responds not only to conscious thought but to subconscious belief. Because what we assume to be real—what we expect to happen—is the blueprint that the universe follows. The greatest limitation is not the world outside us, but the world inside us. If you believe life is struggle, then struggle is the form reality takes. If you believe people cannot be trusted, you will attract only proof of that belief. If you believe you are unworthy, the universe will reflect that back to you at every turn.

Which means the greatest illusion is not just reality itself. The greatest illusion is the belief that we do not control it.

Spinoza argued that free will is an illusion, that we are merely playing out a script written by cause and effect. But quantum physics disagrees. It tells us there is no fixed script, only infinite probabilities. The script is written in real-time. The moment of choice is the moment of creation.

Kant believed in universal moral law, a structure woven into reality itself. But if reality is created by consciousness, then morality is not found—it is chosen. There is no divine decree. No ultimate right or wrong. Just the choices we make, the world we shape with those choices, and the consequences that follow.

If we step even further, beyond science, beyond philosophy, beyond logic itself, we find the final question. Consciousness—the thing that observes, that chooses, that gives reality its form—what is it? Is it the product of the brain, or is the brain merely an interface, a receiver, a tuning mechanism for something greater? If all reality is a projection, then where does the projector reside?

Some will say it is the soul. Some will say it is universal consciousness, the divine experiencing itself through infinite perspectives. Some will say it is a mystery that cannot be solved. But what if the answer does not need to be found? What if the answer is something we, too, must create?

If reality is an illusion, then nothing binds us except what we accept as true. If time is not real, then we are not bound by its limits. If the past is still happening somewhere, then we can rewrite it. If the future is already forming, then we can step into the one we desire most.

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return dares us to ask: if you had to live this life, exactly as it is, over and over for eternity, would you change anything? But what if the question is deeper? What if you are already living only the version of reality that you believe in? What if you are already in the loop of your own making, bound not by time but by the patterns of thought you refuse to change?

What if the way out is not to escape—but to wake up?

To realize that reality is not something we find. It is something we dream into being.

So dream wisely. Dream with intention. Dream with the full knowledge that what you see, you have chosen.

Reality does not exist. It is created. ✨