If you have never been to Africa, would you be able to identify a giant African elephant, or a giraffe, or a male lion with a huge mane, or a black mamba? Or if you have never been to Europe, would you be able to identify the Eiffel Tower, Windsor Castle, the leaning tower of Pisa? If you have never been to Egypt, would you recognize the pyramids or the sphinx?

Of course, you say. There are photographs of them on the internet, or you know people that have been to those places and returned to show the photographs and tell the story. Books have been written about them, and therefore they must be real.

But the same rule does not apply to fairies or trolls or mermaids or angels, right? We all know that these things do not really exist. And we all know that people are giants or dwarfs because of their genetic disposition or because of particular glands that malfunction. That means if some people can see angels and trolls and fairies but we cannot see them, there is something wrong with those people. If other people can describe giraffes and the Eiffel Tower just from a picture where we cannot, because we have never seen them, then that is OK. Does that make sense?

Let's look at this from a different angle. We know that our thoughts create images, and these images then materialize. Am I saying that we just imagine things like angels or fairies? In a way yes, but bear with me. We first imagine everything on this earth, from the chair that you sit on to the PC or laptop that you are reading this on to the food that you eat and the clothes that you wear. None of these things just appear from thin air. They are all first just an image, or a figment of our imagination, and then the image materializes. Of course we contribute to this materialization, because we use tools to make things. But where did the tools come from? Exactly. Somebody first imagines them, and then made them.

But if we can imagine things and then make them, where do we get the images from? From our minds? Yes and no.

There is a world that is identical to ours in another dimension. We become aware of that world by means of our imagination. That is why imagination is a doorway to a different dimension. That world is where all our ideas and inspirations come from. The same world contains the ideas of geniuses and murderers. We choose what we take from that world, and we imagine all of these things (i.e. we create images of them) and then the images materialize.

So do mermaids really exist? How about dwarves? And can the story of David and Goliath be based on a real giant? Why is it that all fairies and angels have wings? Is it at all possible that people have actually seen these things, as real as you see your breakfast spoon?

Have you seen that lovely red mushroom with the white spots that appears in the drawings that go with fairy tales? Have you ever seen such a mushroom for real? The scientific name of that mushroom is Amanita Muscaria. They are also known as magic mushroom because of their hallucinogenic-type effects ' the same effects are induced by LSD. They grow in the northern hemisphere, and have been used for many years by shamans to induce an altered state of consciousness. Because you have never seen them for real, does not mean that they do not exist.

Some people believe in angels because they are mentioned in the Bible, but they do not believe that the angels actually exist for real. They laugh and wonder about the sanity of the people that can see and talk to angels, but it is OK for them to believe that there are churches with round tops in Moscow, even though they have never seen them.

Many children believe that they can see fairies, and it is much more than a belief ' for them it is real. For their parents it is just a child's active imagination, and they regard it as part of their parental duties to get the child to acknowledge that pictures of fairies are just that ' pictures of some fancy figment of someone's imagination.

Because we deny our own truths with small things like the existence of fairies, we also deny larger truths such as inspirations, ideas and flashes of our own futures that come from the same sources. We deny ourselves a richness of life that is there for us to enjoy at all times, if we are willing to stretch the boundaries of our truths.