this moment... is gone

Imagination - an interesting ability that we humans have, that enables a beautiful world to reside within us and also outside. So much so that it is hard to tell which is real. Dreams are another way of enjoying a presence beyond the waking reality. If you never wake up, then in your mind, is the dream all there is? I don't have a strong enough recollection of my dreams to say whether in one sleeping session I have one dream end to end, or a set of smaller independent ones. I think it's the latter, but don't feel confident in telling for sure. Why don't I? Am I lying somewhere with a deeper-than-natural sleep induced somehow, dreaming all this I call my life, like they show in the Matrix movies? While it doesn't seem like we have control over our dreams, we certainly have a handle on our imagination, although it can be argued that at some end of the chain of causality, we don't really know where thoughts and ideas come from. Without going that far, if we choose - like we do - to picture our thoughts in more video-like fashion rather than snapshots, we can take them to an end where scenarios plays in our minds in their finer details. That requires us to have enormous control on our minds, given all the disturbance they're subjected to. An awareness that the situation is imagined, yet living it in the mind like its happening for real - it's closer in nature to virtual reality of the technology world - and dreams in our sleep. And like in a dream, it is sometimes possible to forget the unrealness of it and get so immersed in it that one forgets his/her real identity which is outside the dream or the imagined state. Is someone's illusion someone else's reality? Within layers and layers of imagery, am I just an image? Am I dreaming? Am I imagining? Am I being dreamed? Am I being imagined? - this person that is me at the moment. But wait, the moment's gone...