Cloudscape

In dreams only you are alone. Only when you are alone are you dreaming. But when a dream is shared, it becomes reality.

One of the functions of our dreams, including daydreams, is to represent a model of reality; therefore, we should try to become aware of our dreams and daydreams, and try to achieve the best possible outcome in them. In this way, we will not only be more ready when the situation in question comes in reality, but we will also harmonize our feelings: if something negative happens in our daydreams, it will affect our feelings negatively, while if something positive happens in our daydreams, it will effect them positively. Therefore, in our dreams we should do that which feels best as well as we should in reality. If something negative happens in your daydreams, set it right.

Conceive of all reality as impossible, and it will stand out in all the clearer reality. Say to yourself at everything you perceive that for all the mysteries of its wonders, it simply cannot possibly exist — when this thought then collides with the undeniable fact of its existence, it will stare you in the face and defiantly stand out in all the sharper contrast.

Everything is perception, and so all perceptions about the present are equally true. Only perceptions of what may happen to one's perception in future can be false.
For instance, someone may believe they will not hurt when they sticks their hand in the fire, but when they do, they will usually find that their hand does hurt; the belief that they would not hurt themselves was therefore false. However, if someone believes they will hurt their hand when they stick their hand in a hallucinated fire, that may indeed very well hurt if they hallucinate the pain; the belief that they would hurt themselves was therefore true.
Whatever perception someone has is true to themselves, for as long as their perception lasts; the only reason that it may not be true to others is quite simply that they do not have the same perception.
As another example, the perception that the sun turns around the earth is true to anyone who holds it, as in their perception it is true. However, the belief that, when they observe the universe, their observations will conform to the predictions of their belief, is false.
Thus, the causality of our perceptions is the only truth that matters; whatever lies unchangeably beyond our perception is irrelevant since it might as well not exist at all. All our perceptions about the current are true; only our perceptions about the future may be false since our perceptions about the current might change in future.

To this day, there is no therapy specific for psychosis except for antipsychotics. A therapist can talk to a psychotic in the hopes that they will gain more insight in their own situation just like any other patient, but they can't give them any treatment which focuses particularly on psychosis.
Perhaps to this purpose, psychologists could subject the patient to a kind of training, a reality training. In such training, questions could be asked about a purely hypothetical person in a specific circumstance which relate to the patient's psychosis, such as:

"Person A finds that someone is following him or her. Is it more likely that:
A) the follower is involved in a governmental conspiracy, or
B) the follower wants to ask person A directions.

It may be useful to sketch the characters in the hypotheses as specifically as possible, so that, although they may be similar to the patient, the patient can think of them as other people. They do not have to be of the same age, sex, race, or personality. Important is that it is asked not what IS true, but what is more likely to be true. Implying that their delusions are false may make them defensive about their truth; they have to decide for themselves if they are true or false, but we can make them have a clearer view of their own situation by projecting it onto other people, so that they learn how others deal with them.
If one tries to convince a patient that their delusions are false by arguing about it, it is very possible that they will see one as being part of the conspiracy in their delusions. This probability is increased by the fact that many schizophrenics are often highly sensitive and might see criticism about their beliefs as a personal attack.
Because psychotics have a lot of imagination, they think highly parallel. They think in multiple possibilities, but are unable to see which is most relevant. They see so many possibilities in their mind that they no longer see which are likely to happen in reality and which are not.
Most people will tell psychotics that their delusions are impossible. In fact, nothing is impossible: it is always possible that they are being followed by someone who is involved in some conspiracy, but it's just very unlikely. Because psychotics are so good in hypothesizing, when they are told that something is impossible, they will eventually realize that this isn't true. "What if my father had somehow gained access to top secret information without my knowing and is keeping it somewhere, what if the FBI is pursuing me for this?" What often happens then is that when the psychotic realizes that their delusions are, after all, a possibility, they will wonder why whoever is telling them that they are impossible is "deceiving" them, which might make them believe that they as well are involved in some conspiracy which is meant to keep them from knowing the truth. Instead, it is better to tell them that their delusions, while possible, are very unlikely.
To a schizophrenic, the relevant possibility is no longer the most probable one, but the most drastic one. Because of their high faculties of imagination, they will also be able to imagine all possibilities very vividly; what then matters to them most is those imagined possibilities which elicit most emotion when they imagine them, that is to say, those which they fear or hope for the most. It doesn't seem to matter how likely they are because in their minds, they are already real: they happen in their fantasy as vividly as a dream happens in our own.

I am still wondering. And I wonder if ever in my life I will find answers. I know that there are no certainties and that most of the things we believe to know are just guesses, and with guesses we'll have to do. Am I to guess, then, that consciousness arose from matter or matter from consciousness, or both? Is this a dream or reality, or both?

I can't make sense of this puzzle. But it still seems to me like the only explanation is that, as everything is just how we perceive it to be, everything will also be as we perceive it will be. If there are an infinity of identical universes which each have a different fate, just what determines in which universe we are?

The law of attraction does not seem to make much sense at first: things too often go wrong for us. But the mind is a strange, strange thing. Our subconscious is always stronger than our conscious, as is shown when we try to stop smoking, for instance. Maybe, while our conscious decides one thing, our subconscious has thought of something altogether different. Perhaps it is our subconscious which is the God in each of us, which decides how our lives will be from moment to moment.

Perhaps, deep down inside of each of us there is a writer of our own lives. And writers can give their characters a tough time. Why? After all, people read a book to experience in the place of the characters -- why would they want to go through a tough time in their place?

The answer is, of course, simple. Because that's just part of what makes their adventures appealing. Perhaps if we are in suffering that means we just need suffering.

And perhaps part of us doesn't want to believe that we are the masters in our own game, and thus leave part of what happens in our lives to coincidence. We want things to make sense. It would be very frightening if we could cause reality itself to break down simply with our thoughts.

But it is complicated. And the inner writer within us is hard to understand. Because it understands things we do not. Unlike us, it knows what it is doing, and looks at our own lives from a distance.

Something you should surely have read if you've visited my blog at all - probably my most shocking idea.

In an infinite universe, everything is real. Probabilities depend on time and space, thus is both time and space are infinite, all probabilities in the universe are equal to one. This is the basic idea of ergodicity.
This infinity has highly bizarre consequences. Think of the most absurd things you can think of - monkeys raining from a clear sky, trees sprouting from nuclear waste in seconds, atoms arranging themselves to a microscopic epic, molecules across a solar system falling into place to form a hi-tech civilization, a live alien popping into existence in space -- these are all configurations of energy which are theoretically possible, and as Feynman said, anything which can happen will happen. It's all happening, right now and every moment, an infinite number of times. How surreal!
The punchline: the very fact that you can think of something happening means that it IS happening. This principle is known as modal realism: all imaginary worlds are as real as our own, "real" world. Remember that when you're reading a book, or slip into a reverie -- you're having a vision of something which is actually happening.
But it's not over yet -- there's something even more amazing about modal realism…
If everything is real, that means everything is true. After all, it would mean that there is a causal association between all things, and in fact all things are connected. This would actually make all delusions true, as anything that would happen would not only have several causes, but all causes one could think of. For instance, if a paper one looks at suddenly floats away, this would be both because the wind blew it away and because one has telekinetic abilities. There obviously appears to be something wrong here.
In principle, according to chaos theory it may actually be possible to cause a paper to float away by looking at it. But this is not necessarily so, and moreover, it can not be caused both by one's thoughts and the wind.
But because of the ergodic nature of an infinite universe, there would simultaneously be a world where it is caused by the wind and a world where it is caused by one's thoughts, quite simply because if the universe is infinite, everything is. These worlds could otherwise be identical, except in the cause of the paper floating away. Because the universes would be perceived in the same way, they would per definition have the same essence, so that there would be no telling in which of these universes one is. In fact, one could well say one is in both universes at once.
As long as you don't know if something is true or false, it is both true and false, because your own perception matches both the universe where it is true and the universe where it is false. Of course, the only condition for something to be true is that you perceive it to be, that is, that your qualia makes it a possibility (for instance, that you discern something is either true or false, not both). Then, there is always a chance that you'll be in the universe where it is true.
Of course, this chance may be very low, as only in a small percentage of the universes which the many identical "yous" would perceive as identical, it would really be true. Still, however, as long as you have no definitive "proof" whether it is or isn't, it is true, because you have all the perceptions of the you who lives in the universe where it is true, and therefore you are essentially that you. To clarify, nothing really exists if it can't be perceived, thus if the difference between the universe where the idea in question is true and the universe where it is false cannot be perceived, it does not really exist as such, either.
And of course, things are even further complicated because the so-called "proof" that it is or isn't true, which would necessarily be part of one's sensorial input, could be hallucinatory, it'd be essentially worthless: you could still be in a universe where the sensorial input of the proof is an illusion and the idea in question is still either true or false. There is no separation between what we know and what we imagine.
This means that everything is in a dual state, from quantum to universe. This explains the principle of Heisenberg, because we can't (yet) know the state of an individual quantum. This version of this principle is known as the many worlds principle, though the latter was perhaps not founded upon modal realism.
Any possibility one can conceive has a 100% probability of happening somewhere in the multiverse. Thus, any story you can think of is true. Somewhere in the infinite numbers of universes in the multiverse, it happens just like you imagined. If the universe is infinite, space and time are all that separate us from that which we imagine. Imagination, therefore, is a discovery.