Meaning Of Illusions Essay, Research Paper
The True Meaning of Our Illusions
Every human being has illusions. Unfortunately, the majority of the time, we are unable to uncover their true meaning. This does not mean that our precious visionary images have no answer or meaning and that they make no sense.
Our illusions are based and composed with the daily interaction that we have with our culture, personal pre-occupations and daily experiences that sometimes are hard to believe. These are constantly reflected throughout our lifes in a way that we might not be able to notice. An illusion is defined in the Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia as a false sensory perception of an actual stimulus (Encarta, par.1). This article is convincing us that most of our mental images are in a form of basically interrupted stories that are made up partially of our memories and full of frequent scenes from what we encountered in our daily vitality. They can also have an integration of parts from our emotions that are constantly present in them, if we feel depressed, in harmony or loneliness. In psychological terms, illusions are consider to be a very natural process and necessary rather than being conginated as abnormal, which are sometimes known as passive illusions. This means that our mind plays with our optical visibility by projecting strange figures with a continuous persistence which are usually based on our habits, attitudes and unconscious
motivations. These usual visionary spectrums are described in The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology in an article written by B. R. Bugelski as:
A faint and fleeting, undetailed, and partial, but some people report having vivid, detailed images. Presumably people differ in the strength of their imagery, and certainly the differ in scores attained on various sense areas. (210)
This brief explanation tells us that our illusions are now known to be an undetermined amount of unreal images presented to the bodily of our mental vision, which is also to be a comprehension of a deceptive appearance or a false show.
The human race is discovering something new everyday about the connotation of our visions according to The Encyclopedia Americana :
The Gestalt school of psychology, what we see is the result of processes of organization in the brain. Such processes are based on relationships between aspects of the stimulus, so that impressions of size, shape, color, and the like are determined not to merely by the retinal image of the object itself but by the other objects present in the field as well. This general doctrine is now widely accepted. (785)
Many researchers had finally discovered the true significance and the biology and the stage of our illusions. This paragraph proves that studies about our mental visions are very common and they ve been one of the main challenges for the majority of researchers from all over the world. If our illusions express important wishes, fears and concerns of a particular person, the studies and
the analysis of these false visions can help reveal previously unknown aspects of a person s mental functioning. It seems that they have so many meanings that we can t described them but most of the time we tend to follow or believe the better interpretation that we find. They have been long exercised as a fascination over the human imagination:
Many illusions are generated by ticking the normal processes by which the brain interprets sense data. An illusion of this sort essentially brought about the development of the motion picture industry. (Britannia 261)
Pleasant or disturbing illusions are always leaving behind impressions that are hard to dismiss or forget. Sometimes, even without knowing for sure the message or the meaning of these images that are constantly present in our daily life. When we visualized something that makes us very happy, we don t think that it is unreal and this is not what we encountered in an every day situation and the majority of them only depend on the expression of the determined illusion. They are unavoidable, and they often seem to be weird and strange, but they surely have a purpose and explanation of why they appear. In addition, illusions have no inherent meaning, but are simply a process by which the brain integrates new information and images into our memories:
If perception is considered to be the result of certain principles of brain functioning, which are based on the sensory information available it is plausible to suppose that these functions will not always lead to correct perception. Sometimes, writers are always integrating the experience of having an illusion in their novels and stories, this is to help the readers to have a more open and better understanding of the inexplicable connections between the characters of a given story.
The story A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, is a good example of how our society uses illusions when the characters are faced with an uncomfortable daily unexpected situation. The main female character, Emily Grierson, was having illusions. We have noticed that she kept believing that her father was not dead after three days of knowing it:
She told them that her father was not dead. She did this for three days, with the minister calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to the law and forces, she broke down, and they buried he father quickly. (29)
In many cases, people who had lost a relative or loved person use their illusions to put away their sadness and to feel comfortable in life after an lost. In Emily s situation, she did this because she figured out that she was now alone in the world and the most reasonable thing to do was to imagine or to make believe her mind that her father was only taking a long nap rather than facing the devastated lost. Faulkner is making us understand that maybe because she was raised only by her father, that the most reasonable way of not feeling alone after his death was by keeping the body in her house:
We did not say she was crazy then. We believed that she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with
nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. (29)
Secondly, Flannery O connor s Everything that Rises Must Converge is also a great example on how a human being incorporates their illusions to evade reality. The main female character, whose name is not given and is referred to as Julian s mother, and she is constantly living in a world of illusions. a good illustration is that Julian s mother was a rich woman when she was young. Now, all the luxury, the mansion and the evening cocktails are gone but unfortunately she believes or imagines that when she walks around her neighborhood she is important and still a society lady because she is well dressed using a hat and gloves She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity (321). This means that she will not let go of her past because it was a good and comfortable life, and she still believes that nothing has happened or that the fortune is still there. She was only surviving according to her untrue illusions which made her very happy but her son Julian was always reminding her that Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are (321), this was a way of waking her up from her mental images. It seems to be that she was trapped in time but only for her benefit She lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which he had never seen her set foot (323). O connor is setting a great example in her short story by explaining that people who had lost their social position no matter how long ago, she
still walk around believing that their position had never been lost as well as using their imagination and illusions to evade the crude reality that surrounds them.
In their stories, Faulkner and O connor are letting us rationalize that no one can really have an exact interpretation of the meaning of our illusions because the only one responsible for its appearance is our brain but even though there is no final answer on what they mean, there is no certain explanation that they happened because the human being needs to find a way to block things that we don t want to realize that are truth and this is why illusion plays a big role in our daily lives.