INTRODUCTION:
WE ARE WATCHING A COPY OF OUR LIVES

Right now, the book you believe you are holding, together with its printed text and illustrations in bright, vivid colors, is in reality a three-dimensional image in your brain. Similarly, the embossed logo you feel when you touch the book's cover is something you are "touching" only in your brain.

You may think that the book is outside of you because your hand can feel the smoothness of its pages. But in reality, when you believe you're touching the book, you are turning its pages inside your brain, and feeling their thin smoothness there.

When you look at this book, the light reflected from its pages is converted into electrical impulses by the cells of your eye's retina. These signals, carrying details of the book's shape, color and thickness, are transmitted to your brain's visual center via the optic nerves, where they are interpreted into a concise whole. In this way, the book's appearance is recreated inside the darkness of your brain. Therefore, statements like, "I'm seeing with my eyes," or, "This book's in front of me" do not reflect true reality. Your eye only converts the light it receives into electrical impulses. The image of the book you behold doesn't lie outside you, as you have always thought, but on the contrary, inside your skull. Furthermore, never can you know for certain whether the visualizations in your mind reflect the actual reality "outside," or even if there are material correlates for them.

You could be thinking that this book lies outside you simply because you can feel the smoothness of its pages under your fingers. But this sensation of smoothness, just like the phenomenon of "seeing," is formed in your brain. When the touch-sensitive nerve cells on your fingertips are stimulated, they transmit stimuli to your brain in the form of electrical signals. Receiving these messages, your brain's touch center interprets them into such sensations as touch, pressure, softness or hardness, coldness or warmth. And you, inside your brain, come to sense the hardness of the book, the smoothness of its pages or its embossed logo when your hand touches them. In reality though, you never can touch the actual book. When you think you're doing so, in reality you're only turning its pages in your brain and-again, in your brain-feeling the thinness and smoothness of its pages.

The same is true for all your other senses. In the air, the vibrating string of a guitar creates pressure waves, which then stimulate the hairlike structures in the inner ear. The vibrations thus created are converted into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the relevant center in the brain and interpreted there-whereupon you experience the sensation of hearing the sounds of the guitar.

Likewise, your sense of smell is formed in the brain. Chemical molecules, escaping a lemon's peel stimulate receptors in the nose, are converted into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain for interpretation.

In short, all that you can perceive-what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell-is all recreated specially for you in your brain. Therefore, when we speak of our perception of the surrounding environment, we are talking only about our inner "copies" of those same colors, shapes, sounds and smells.

We perceive the world in so perfect a way that we believe in an external reality. But that "reality" is not so very different from the dreams we experience at night, inside our heads. In dreams, we are aware of the external events, sounds and sights; even our own bodies. We think and ponder. We feel the emotions of fear and anger, pleasure and love. We speak with other people, whom we believe we are observing the same things as they are, and even discuss them with them. Even in our dreams, we are convinced that a material world exists around us. But upon awakening, suddenly we realize that everything we thought we experienced took place only in our minds.

When we wake up and say, "It was only a dream," we mean that our experiences were not physical or "real," but only the products of our minds. While awake, on the other hand, we believe that there's a one-to-one correspondence between our perception and the physical world. But in fact, the experiences in our wakeful state are lived out in our minds, just as our dreams are.

Why do you think that you are awake now? Probably because you feel this book in your hands. You can comment on what you read; and everything around you displays a consistent continuity. But these perceptions-the hand with which you hold this book, the pages you're turning, the furniture surrounding you and your location in the room- all these are only replicas observed within your brain. Were you asked, "Right now, are you awake or are you dreaming?" surely you would answer, "Of course I'm awake!"

Possibly you've asked yourself this question in your dreams, many times. Of course, the answer you gave then-"Of course I am!"-would be exactly the same as you'd give right now. But only now, when you're truly awake, do you realize that your answer then was wrong.

So could it be that you're making the same mistake now? Who can guarantee that you're not actually dreaming right now-or even that your entire life has not been a dream? How can you be at all certain of the reality of the world in which you live?

In the following pages, you'll see that this certainty can never be possible. First, let's examine some movies that deal with the scientific facts revealing this "reality" and the explanations we've given in various earlier publications.