It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal meterials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
– Ben Okri
Ben Okri was born in 1959. In 1991, he won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. His answer to the question of what reality is could be summarized as follows:
I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death … Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone’s reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there’s more to the fabric of life. I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.