The real world is where the monsters are.

The Real World'

The real word doesn't take flight
the way dreams do.
No muffled voice, no doorbell
can dispel it,
no shriek, no crash
can cut it short.

Images in dreams
are hazy and ambiguous,
and can generally be explained
in many different ways.
Reality means reality:
that's tougher nut to crack.

Dreams have keys.
The real world opens on its own
and can't be shut.
Report canrds and stars
pour from it,
butterflies and flatiron warmers
shower down,
headless caps
and shards of clouds.
Together they form a rebus
that can't be solved.

Without us dreams couldn't exist.
The one on whom the real world depends
is still unknown,
and the products of his insomnia
are avaialble to anyone
who wakes up.

Dreams aren't crazy-
it's the real world that's insane,
if only in the stubbornness
with which it sticks
to the current of events.

In dreams our recently deceased
are still alive,
in perfect health, no less,
and restored to the full bloom of youth.
The real world lays the corpse
in front of us.
The real world doesn't blink an eye.

Dreams are featherweights,
and memory can shake them off with ease.
The real world doesn't have to fear forgetfulness.
It's a tough customer.
It sits on our shoulders,
weights on our hearts,
tumbles to our feet.

There's no escaping it,
it tags along each time we flee.
And there's no stop
along our escape route
where reality isn't expecting us.

Because I write contemporary, magical realism and speculative for both children and adults, I spend a lot of time thinking about real settings for the contemporary books and the pieces that could be taken from those places to create fantasy spaces. But I also like to look for the magic in the real world…

"Real life?" What's that?

Sure, but real life's not actually like that," Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. "You don't just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You're not going to be a character in a story, there's nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn't work like that.

Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”
I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.
“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”

You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with. Like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then I'm in the real world – I'm on the beam. Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right. When I'm slipping, I say: he, this is interesting. It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.

I showed you that it is unreality that makes the world real. ‘
‘I don’t understand’
‘You take every day for granted. That for you is real.
But if you stop taking it for granted it becomes unreal. Unreality makes the world real. If you remember how unreal the world is, you will be fine

Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas ... that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.

The world is not the way they tell you it is.

I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.