When I was getting ready to go to the club Friday night, I was doing the final "once over" of my look in the mirror before heading out and was saying to myself "what if" this was real? Then it dawned on me, who says it isn't? By definition in the "real" world" I'm a guy but for all intents and purposes when I get dolled up like this I am Salandra and experience things in this incarnation and am related to and reacted to as such. It is a real experience so who's to say it is any less viable or valid as what we consider "real life"?
Most of us are familiar with virtual reality simulations in which we would be experiencing things in a virtual world and environment and in which we would create a different person or character and play a role or part. How is this any different really? We experience, we interact, we have all the abilities and characteristics of the character we become. We do it for fun but it is value added as we become empowered to do things we would not "normally" do and in this instance it is no less "genuine" than the so called real world.
Therein lies the value but also the potential danger. I say danger because like a virtual reality scenerio, it can be easy to get lost in the program and potentially lose ourselves in the process. Most of us have read the sci-fi books and seen the movies to that effect. This is something I realized a while back because I was literally living my life as my femme self as much as possible. Problem is, my "program" had the tendency to take over, it's not hard for that to happen really, expecially when the pink fog rolls in.
The mind is a powerful thing and our power of creation is virtually unlimited when you think about it. This is one reason I decided to go for balance and integration of my feelings because I realized just how easily things can go out of balance if I go too far one way or the other. It's a very old issue, structure and control vs freedom and creativity and it's part of the reason we are here to begin with to help settle it once and for all and it can be a delicate balancing act sometimes. It is possible to do both however as many of us here are demonstrating.
It's all as real or imagined as we want it to be. In the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" when Christopher Pike asked Vena if she was real or imagined, her answer was "As real as you wish" and the Talosians saw to it with mind power that Pike could see her any way he desired. The experience was no less real to him. We have the same power as the Talosians. The real skill is to use it wisely.