I'm developing this odd idea that stories actually are real. Doesn't the story guide everything? And become real. I remember hearing George Michael's song "Freedom 90"::

"All we have to do now

Is take these lies and make them true somehow"

I have a set of quotes I'm piling up over time to suggest that perhaps a story becomes real over time. "The past becomes more real as fiction than as fact." --Gilbert Highet,, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature

The 19th century novelist Samuel Butler muses: "The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”

In the Diamond Sutra the Buddha says:

"All conditioned phenomena

Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,

Like dew drops and a lightning flash:

Contemplate them thus.”