Are the things that exist only in our heads real?

Pretty much all of us have fantasies all the time. Some people practically live in these fantasies. They get involved in video games or rpgs or virtual interactive spaces, and can spend hours of each day there. Some people think that’s an addiction or unhealthy, mentally speaking.

On social sites where strangers meet, the only thing they know is what the other person says about themselves. The other person could be lying, of course, or misrepresenting themselves. Pictures could also be misrepresentations. So what you know, quite possibly, has little representation to the reality on the ground, so to speak.

Still, all this creation of a fantasy vision of another person or another place, as when we read a novel, is real inside our heads. No one could prove it is there, but we would probably all agree that we can “picture” things we’ve never actually seen. I am using “picture” loosely, as a metaphor for all senses.

Who are we, when we present ourselves here? What is “here” anyway? Is an imagined thing a real thing? And what relationship does all this have to do with what we believe to be the “real” world?