What is not perceived, conceived, believed, learned, or understood, is not real.  What happens in the eleventh galaxy is not real because we do not know about it nor do we suspect that it affects us.  Reality is a relative affair.
      Imagination, on the other hand, is real because we sense it and believe it.  It is far more convincing than reality because it is our own personal creation—we often deny reality but we have trouble denying what our imaginations reveals to us.  Our world flies to imagination and flees from reality.  Let us remember that most wars are fought, and all religions are adopted and preached, in order to satisfy the imagination.  Alexander the Great, the Islamic invasions, the Crusades, Colonial Europe, America, Hitler, Israel, Vietnam, the nuclear arms race, space programs, to name but a few, were all primed and driven by imagination only to be deflated by reality.  It’s only a matter of time before we lose all that we have fought for and won.
      Between patients and doctors, reality is usually sad but imagination brings hope.  Mental illness is the one exception.  It is the malady of imagination grounded in painful hopelessness.  When a human is defeated by reality, he may rise again and may even emerge stronger.  But when a human’s imagination is defeated, hopelessness supervenes and relief might not come except through death.
      Treading on someone’s imagination is tantamount to trampling on their God-given soul and taking away their hopes, aspirations, and their fifth dimension—that personal world in which they find their faith, freedom, and joy.  Imagination is God’s gift to all of us and is also the way we touch and are touched by God.  It is our conduit to heaven, our orbit above reality, and our metaphysical realm that we create with powers given to us by our creator in order to find Peace with God.  Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) tethered Peace to God when he said:
      “For you will have peace to the extent that you have God. Anything that is at peace has God in it to the extent that it is at peace. Thus you may measure your progress with God by measuring your peace or the lack of it.”
      Contemplating the same dimension, that fifth dimension of spirit, the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) took us to untrespassed heights with his poem, Cloths of Heaven:
      “Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,         
       Enwrought with golden and silver light,
       The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
       Of night and light and the half light,
       I would spread the cloths under your feet:
       But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
       I have spread my dreams under your feet;
       Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

      Imagination is our heavenly home and reality, our earthly prison.