Having just finished the biography of Philip K Dick(I am alive and you are dead) I found myself wondering how valid are our views on what constitutes reality.
I myself have never experienced the awful paranoia, nor the earth shaking visions and feelings of transcendance, that Dick did. I have however had some chemical induced sleights of mind that allow me to put forward my own views on what I believe reality to be. Reality is what is real to you, and everything experienced is valid.
With XTC coursing through my system one evening, I had the odd, and rather disconcerting sensation that I was in two different rooms at the same time. This was real, and I was so disorientated that I had to be taken next door to a friends house so as not to alarm my parents.
Now any neuroscientist worth his salt would say that this was just an altered sense of perception brought about by the action of MDMA working on the receptors of the brain and causing something akin to an out of body experience. And that neuroscientist would be right.
But even a state of mind so drastically different to our everyday life could be said to be real, on its own terms. The sense of being in two places at the same time, no matter how such an effect was acheived, was real at the time of experiencing it and constituted solid reality at that time. In those moments I was really in two places at the same time. Make of it what you will.