Inter-reality

The History of Inter reality
The concept of relating realities is presented by Plato in his ‘The Republic’ dialogs. Before Thomas More created his Utopia in 1516, Plato had discussed in detail the formation of a perfect nation state: Utopia. And while More's utopia meant an imaginary world, Plato's was essentially a potential reality.
In 1619 Robert Fludd presented "Oculus imaginationis" (The Eye of the Imagination) in his book 'Utriusque Cosmi . . . historia (The History . . . of this World and the Other). The inner eye projects fantasy images onto a screen that lies beyond the back of the head.
Samuel Hibbert published in 1824 a book about visions and identities, which included an elaborate foldout chart about dream states, on which he set out a ‘Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas’. He tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from ‘perfect sleep’ to ‘extreme mental excitement,’ and graded fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from ‘degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,’ where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to ‘Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres’. As Frederic Passy said when he founded the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1889, ‘The world is made of achieved utopias. Today’s Utopia is tomorrow’s reality.’ Thomas More might have chosen the literary device of describing an ideal, imaginary island nation with an open political system primarily as a vehicle for discussing controversial political matters freely. Three centuries later, George Orwell did the same in his novel ‘1984’ which discusses privacy and state-security issues from the view of a dystopia.
Hervieu Léger points out that the hypothesis that this ever increasing – in view of the constant speeding up of knowledge and technology – Utopian space becomes the space within which religious representati-ons are constantly reorganised. Nevertheless such religious represent-tations are subject to an equally permanent destruction by the forces of rationalism. This tradition evokes a community as a concrete social group or by an imaginary genealogy. The chain which binds the believer to the community and the tradition legitimating this religious belief is what Hervieu Léger considers as the essential point for imagination.