One of the insights of Friedrich Nietzsche—at least in my reading of him—is that imagination is a dimension, apart from reality, that you can live in.
This, of course, is also Don Quixote. And Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone:
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.
As physicist Lawrence Krauss once noted in a Cal Tech lecture, human beings have lived (imaginatively) in unreal dimensions from the beginning. Krauss offered this example: a paleolithic artifact of an animal that, obviously, does not really exist:
So is living in reality overrated? Once you perceive that you are flung into a dimension in which God is dead (or silent), and your ultimate questions are unlikely ever to be answered in your lifetime, what should you do?
Isn’t it time to stop worrying about who or where you are really—what the truth is—and just, say, make lion-man totems from pieces of animal bone—or sleep with the pretty ballerina who happens to be in the same curious predicament as you?
Isn’t that the solution to the problem of life–to escape into the “fifth” dimension of the aesthetic or cultural imagination and live in a deception? Why not just create something or do something interesting regardless of what ultimate truth there might be “out there”?
If there is, after all, an ultimate truth (and I think that there is), maybe it’s more boring, less interesting, and less hopeful than the one that you can create in your imagination.
So here’s Nietzsche in a nutshell: reality is overrated. Why don’t you overgo it into the dimension of your own imagination and creative will?
I’m with Nietzsche. If God is dead (or silent), what makes reality more important or real to live in than the imagination?