The mind is a terrifyingly powerful machine. It can summon entire people in dreams—fully fleshed-out characters with personalities, faces, and voices—and it can even drag the dead from their graves, making them walk, talk, and act as if they never left. But here’s the unsettling part: how much of what we see in waking life is real? How much is just another construct of the mind, a hallucination we’re all collectively buying into?

After all, everything we experience boils down to electrical and chemical signals bouncing around our brains. You could be living in a dream world right now, utterly oblivious, mistaking shadows for reality. Worse, you could have multiple personalities, entire versions of yourself you’ve never met, quietly running the show without your consent.

And that raises the most chilling question of all: if the mind is this good at creating illusions, how much of what it makes us do is really us? Maybe that’s the real puzzle—what is “you,” and what is just the ghost in the machine?