The Ones We Know and the Ones We Don’t

When you open your eyes in the morning, you usually see what you expect to see. Often it will be your bedroom, with things where you left them before you went to sleep. What if you opened your eyes and unexpectedly found yourself in a steaming tropical jungle? Why do we have expectations about what is about to happen to us? Why do we get surprised when something unexpected happens to us? More generally, why are we Intentional Beings who are always projecting our expectations into the future? How does having such expectations help us to fantasize and plan events that have not yet occurred? Without this ability, all creative thought would be impossible, and we could not imagine different possible futures for ourselves or our hopes and fears for them. What is the difference between having a fantasy and experiencing what is really there? What is the difference between illusion and reality? What goes wrong when we lose control over our fantasies and hallucinate objects and events that are not really there? Given that vivid hallucinations are possible, especially in mental disorders like schizophrenia, how can we ever be sure that an experience is really happening and is not just a particularly vivid hallucination? If there a fundamental difference between reality, fantasy, and illusion, then what is it?