Perceptual Cartography: The Hallucination We Call the Self
- Jesse Jacques
- Jun 30
- 5 min read
Lately, much of my professional creative work has revolved around these questions: how perception becomes a story and how that story becomes reality. My MONAD project, which I'm finishing up, has pulled me deeper into this territory, and I’ve found that the more I look, the more provisional everything starts to seem. Today, I’m tracing the outlines of that dream we call reality and the smaller dream inside it we call ourselves.
Most of us grow up convinced that reality is something we inherit; solid, obvious, and not up for negotiation. And it’s useful to think this way. It lets us get on with the practical business of being alive. But if you look a little closer, you start to see that much of what feels certain is held together by agreement more than evidence.
Of course, some aspects of reality have more resilience than others. A brick still behaves like a brick, no matter what story you tell about it. But most of what feels immovable in human life is more pliable than we’re taught to believe.
You can see this most clearly in the things we rarely question.
Take a border on a map. It’s a line you can’t actually see when you walk across it, yet that invisible boundary decides which laws you follow, which language you speak, and sometimes whether you live or die. Or consider money. A few decades ago, a piece of paper with a certain design was worth almost nothing. Now, a similar piece of paper can buy a house or end a marriage. It isn’t the material that changed. It’s the shared story about what the material represents.
A flag is just cloth and dye until enough people agree it stands for something worth protecting. It becomes a symbol powerful enough to inspire loyalty or justify conflict. The meaning isn’t woven into the fabric. It’s woven into the agreement.
Even a calendar is just a set of numbers we pretend describe time precisely. And the hours you trade for a paycheck are another collective understanding about what effort is worth.
This is what I mean when I use the word hallucination. Not a delusion in the way people often imagine, but a quiet consensus that fills in the gaps so the world feels stable. Some call it perception, but it’s just as true to call it a kind of dreaming with open eyes.
The same pattern runs through the idea of the self. The labels you carry, like your name, your nationality, and your temperament, feel factual because you’ve rehearsed them for so long. Other people have mirrored them back to you, confirming the story until it seemed inevitable. But if you pay attention, you may notice how many of these details are agreements you never realized you were making.
Even the preferences that feel most personal often have their roots in someone else’s expectations. Maybe you were praised for being ambitious, so you learned to value striving above all else. Maybe you were told you were shy, so you shaped yourself to match the description. Over time, the line between what you genuinely are and what you’ve learned to perform can blur until it feels like no line exists at all.
And whether you notice it or not, these stories don’t arise in a vacuum. They are constantly reinforced by the culture around you, by institutions, by media, by the people with the loudest signals to broadcast. If you don’t question them, you end up agreeing by default, letting your sense of reality be shaped by whoever benefits most from your certainty.
Some traditions have been pointing to this for centuries. In Hindu philosophy, it’s called Maya, the sense that life is both vividly real and fundamentally illusory. In Buddhism, it’s described as emptiness or dependent arising. Different names for the same recognition: the details matter, but they never tell the whole story. What you call your identity is not a raw fact; it’s a version of yourself you keep rehearsing until it feels permanent. And what you call reality is much the same: a shared dream everyone agrees to repeat.
The moment you stop treating that agreement as inevitable, the surface you stand on starts to ripple.
This doesn’t mean that questioning reality turns you cold or detached. It doesn’t mean you stop caring. If anything, it can make you more responsible for how you participate, where you're less willing to confuse a useful agreement with an unquestioned truth. Because believing in any story without examining it gives it more power than it deserves, sometimes in ways that do harm.
If you look a little further, you might notice something stranger still. The same energy you feel moving through you, such as the quiet current behind your thoughts, is also moving through everyone else. It animates the gestures of strangers you pass on the street. It looks out through eyes that seem separate from yours.
It’s a way of remembering that being human is larger than any script you’ve been given. It hints that whatever you are is less confined than you imagined. That the self is a local expression of something wider, something that continues even when your story changes.
Seeing this doesn’t require you to abandon your life or discard what you love. But it does mean you can stop pretending that any role or description fully contains you. And once you see that, you’re no longer bound to keep acting out a version that no longer fits.
This is the quiet invitation in recognizing how provisional everything is: you don’t have to wait for permission to revise the story. You don’t have to earn the right to imagine something different. You can let some of it soften, right now.
You don’t have to force this recognition or pretend to see it before you do. Often, it arrives gradually, in quiet moments when life stops matching the story you expected. Sometimes it comes as a gentle unsettling, other times as a relief you can’t quite name.
When it does appear, even in a small glimpse, it can feel like the edges of things softening. Like the certainty you’ve held about yourself and the world was never as fixed as you believed.
That’s where the possibility opens. To participate in this shared hallucination without mistaking it for the whole of what’s true. And in that space, you might feel a quieter kind of certainty, that nothing essential about you depends on these shared fictions holding together.
You can’t step outside the hallucination to some perfect vantage point. Awareness doesn’t make you immune to experience. But it does create a small space, a lucid interval where you remember this is a shared dream. If you care about anything at all, this matters. Because the more convinced you are that your version of reality is the only one, the more tightly you have to defend it. And the more you defend it, the less you can see how much is always waiting to be reimagined.
If it changes anything, it’s only that it can loosen the reflex to defend every story you’ve inherited, about who you are, what is possible, and how reality is supposed to be.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
