I’ve lived in my head for as long as I can remember. Not drifting, not daydreaming, but walking streets no one else could see, where the walls of my mind felt sturdier than the brick outside my door. I ruled a hidden kingdom: lunch tables crowded with companions no one else could name, skylines stitched from ceiling cracks, orchestras swelling in the dark as I fell asleep. I once mistook this for oddness. But it’s imagination, after all, that lets us reach beyond ourselves.
Because if you look closely, history is less about what actually happened and more about what we imagined. Myth was the first scaffolding of civilization. Before laws, there were gods with lightning in their fists; before nations, there were stories of chosen people; before science, dragons and giants were filling the empty corners of the map. The ‘Iliad’ isn’t about Troy. It’s about what humans needed to believe in order to survive loss. Even money, the spine of our daily lives, is nothing more than a collective daydream; paper and pixels only hold power because we agree to imagine that they do.
But the strange truth is this: the brain cannot tell the difference between imagining and experiencing. When a pianist only thinks of practicing scales, their neurons fire in the same patterns as if their fingers had touched the keys. When you imagine running, your pulse quickens, your muscles prime. The body rehearses the unreal as though it were fact. That means every story you’ve ever told yourself has, in some invisible way, already happened.
And this is where the mind becomes more than a playground. It becomes a weapon. A lifeline. A sanctuary. Our imaginations are not fragile; they are survival engines. People call it manifesting, but really it’s the old trick of turning vision into muscle, belief into matter. Studies show that telling yourself “I am strong” actually wires the brain toward resilience. Imagining healing can ease pain. Rehearsing courage makes courage more likely to arrive. The mind is both puppeteer and puppet: it shapes the body that then carries it forward.
Maybe that’s why, in our worst seasons — anxiety, depression, heartbreak — we retreat inward. Not because we’re weak, but because we know instinctively that imagination is medicine. The mind can trick itself into survival. It says, “This pain is not forever. This grief is not the whole story. Tomorrow is another day.” And in time, the body follows. To picture light when you’re in darkness is not delusion; it’s grit disguised as dreaming.
So I wonder: how much of life is “real,” and how much is a hallucination we’ve all agreed to share? If I spend a morning walking through the grocery store and an evening reading through a novel, which is the more genuine experience? The bruised peaches I touched with my hand—or the sentence that lodged itself inside me forever?
Sometimes dissociation feels like an illness, like I’ve slipped through the cracks of reality into a private movie I can’t stop replaying. But maybe it’s not an escape. Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps humans evolved not only to endure reality but also to outgrow it, to build whole universes within themselves, because the external world is too small to hold us.
Just as fascinating, the self you believe to be “you” is also an invention. Neuroscientists cannot find a central “I” anywhere in the brain. The self is a story, spun moment by moment from memory and imagination, woven so seamlessly that it feels real. The very figure who eats breakfast, writes essays, and falls in love exists only in your mind.
So I return to the question: is the goal to live in our minds or in the world? Perhaps the distinction doesn’t exist. Maybe the truest life is not one or the other, but that small sliver between them, the place where you imagine hard enough to make something real, and live vividly enough that reality feels like a dream.
After all, every empire begins as a fantasy. Every religion begins as a story. Every love begins as a possibility we dared to believe. Maybe the head is not an escape hatch but the birthplace of everything that matters. Maybe our greatest strength is that we are not fully here. We are always partly elsewhere, conjuring, rehearsing, inventing, surviving.
The kingdom of the head is not a hiding place. It is the origin of all resilience.