When you think about reality you think about your own life and the world around you. From the trees outside your window to the conversation you had with your family over breakfast this morning. Even now reading this, you think about the words and sentences that make the paragraphs and believe that you are actually reading and that the words are real because you can see them with your own mind and eyes. When you think about that last sentence you think about how perception and reality go hand in hand. You can perceive the sentence is there because you can see it, and because you can see it you know that it is real. It is not hard to tell if something is real. You can use your senses to do so. You can touch it and smell it and see it and taste it and maybe even hear it. When you use these senses you can be positive that what you are observing is real. It has a place in reality. A reasonable person can tell something is real as long as they can use their senses. If it is real it can be perceived. If it can be perceived can it be real? Or maybe the question should be if it can be perceived IS it real?
I have thought about this question for a great deal of time. I always get lost in my own head so I thought that maybe writing it down may help me. I often think about this question when I am looking into the mirror. I stare into my own eyes for a moment and I suddenly get very calm. I get stuck looking into my eyes and it feels like I can not move. Then my heart starts to race and I start to feel fear. It appears to me that I am looking at a different person, a person that is not me. I start to think, is this me? It looks like me, but is it me? I can perceive a person standing there perfectly still as I am doing, but the person looking back at me doesn’t seem to be the same as me. In some form or way the person staring at me is not me. How can this be? I am the only person in the room and the only person positioned in front of the mirror. Some people might see this as a sign of some sort of mental illness such as schizophrenia or something, but I ensure you this is not an illness it is a reality. I can perceive that a person is looking in the mirror because I can see that this is true. I can perceive that it is I who is looking into the mirror because I can see myself in the mirror. The thing is, sometimes even though I know it is me I feel like something is off, like it is me, but not me. How do I explain this? I explain this feeling by acknowledging that not everything you perceive is in fact a reality. Take as an example; seeing color. When you look at a school bus you see the color yellow. You see that the bus is yellow because the different frequencies of light that hit the bus are reflected 
back to your eye and your brain translates these frequencies of light to a color and tells you that the color is yellow. This is a process known as color perception. You perceive that the color is yellow because that is what your brain tells you. So if your brain told you that the color was purple, would the color be purple? If your brain tells you the color is purple then to you the color is purple. To someone else the color may be green, and to another it may be blue. In reality the actual color of the bus is unknown. The reason for this is that if the frequencies of light were not reflected from the bus and perceived by your brain you would in fact see nothing, just darkness. Since this is the case, what if the frequencies of light that are reflected from the bus were different. Now instead of seeing a yellow bus you may perceive it to be a different color, maybe a color you may have never seen. Quite possibly if there were no frequencies of light, there would actually never had been a color at all. Since this is true, the bus actually does not have a color at all. That is the reality of the color of the bus.
If you are walking toward the bus, how do you know how far away the bus is? You know because your brain uses a process called depth perception. Due to the process of depth perception you are able to see the world in 3 dimensions. You are able to gauge the distance of the bus because you eyes work as a team to create binocular vision. The way your eyes distinguish depth is very complicated but is more complicated by factors such as movement while looking at the object and eye focus. An example to this is if you are standing close to the bus, the bus looks larger. If you are standing farther away from the bus then it is smaller. Now if you are farther away from the bus and you are walking toward it, the bus will seem to get larger with every step. The opposite if you were walking away from the bus. Now say that you only had one eye. The distance to the bus will be harder to see because your eye can not see depth as good as if you had two, remember that you need to be looking out of two eyes to get the full effect of seeing in 3 dimensions. Now lets say that your eyes are not in the same place on you head. Like a fish your eyes are placed on the sides of your head. Now you do not have binocular vision so your depth perception is very bad. In fact if you are walking straight toward the bus in a parallel line, you most likely won’t even see the bus. So if you don’t see the bus, is it even there? You can not perceive the bus because you can not use your senses to see it. Since you can not perceive the bus, the bus is not real. There is only one “thing” that can not be perceived and could still be real, but that is a whole other theory. Of course, when you walk into the bus and feel the pain you will perceive it and therefore it would be real. Let’s say that you never run into the bus. This is because the bus was never actually there. How do I know? Think about the tree question. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? So if you are the only one around and you can not see the bus, is there even a bus there? The only reason you knew the bus was there before was because you saw it. If you can not see the bus, it is possible that the bus is not there. You can not say whether or not it is there unless you can perceive it.
Now let’s say that you and a friend are in the street next to the bus. You have bifocal vision and your friend does not. You see the bus but your friend does not. The only way your friend knows that there is a bus is if you tell him. Now your friend can perceive the bus because he can hear you tell him there is a bus there. But what if when you say the word bus, your friend hears the word helicopter? What if when you say the bus is yellow, he hears you say the helicopter is orange? Now you have perceived a yellow bus and he has perceived an orange helicopter. To your friend there is deffinatly an orange helicopter in front of him, and he believes this to be a reality. You believe that in reality there is a yellow bus there. Is your friend wrong? No, his perception is his reality. Same goes for you. Now let’s say that you have bifocal vision, perfect hearing, and great sense of feeling, can smell just fine, and have a great sense of taste. Both of you are standing in front of a large rock. You perceive this object to be a yellow bus because when you touch it you feel cold hard metal and when you look at it you see the color yellow and a large bus. Your friend does not perceive this object to be a large yellow bus because he perceives it to be an orange helicopter. When you turn and say that the yellow bus is quite large your friend hears you say that the orange helicopter is quite small. He agrees with you and says that the orange helicopter is quite small but you hear him say the yellow bus is quite large indeed. Does this make you both wrong? No, because you both have your own perceptions of the object so your perception is your reality. In fact in another persons' reality the object is actually a rock. But who is to say the object was a rock to begin with. If another person was standing there also, they may perceive a purple people eater. What if in fact the object was not even really there and all three of you have perceived something from nothing? Does that make all of you crazy? No, you all three are just perceiving what you mind tells you to. I guess the real question is not if something can be perceived is it a reality, but instead the question is, what is reality?
