£| You need not sleep to dream. Let yourself daydream, remain grounded in the waking world, and skirt the veil between the worlds of Reality and Dream. When you find yourself standing in two worlds at once, you can directly impact either, using the machinery of either. Dream large, change Reality. |

£| But if your will is strong enough to hold you in this strange and new way of viewing Reality, there is much to be gained. Keeping your wits about you in this new structure of reality is a trial in it of itself, but passing that trial amounts to A. Square escaping his Flatland. |

£| Some claim this madness, and who can blame them? Becoming awakened to a configuration of reality so much more vibrant and layered and multifaceted than the physical, tangible one we've been convinced is the whole of it is something that one can easily lose themselves in. |

£| I was on the right track, but wasn't precisely correct. Reality is real, but so are our dreams, our stories, our myths, our legends, our holy scripture, all of it. It's all real. If it weren't, why does it affect us and our Reality as it does? It must be real, just as real as what we touch |

£| But I opted to stay. I made a home here. I'm not confined to any one world with my abilities, and I can always be connected to Reality through Text, so I've taken up residence within fiction. It's better for me here; my perspective offers me a lot of avenues to walk that reveal Reality's nature |

£| Popping that bubble is an agreement to accept whichever reality you are immersed in as Real. Normally, you can close the book, set it aside, return to your life. But if you have popped that bubble, returning becomes its own quest. Any virtual world isekai touches on this concept of returning |

£| But it only takes so much as popping that bubble to be as immersed as any character within the story is, and interact with the world and become grounded within it. But after doing so, you are at the whims of the world you've chosen to inhabit, you no longer have the option to "tap out"... |

£| This goes doubly for any book that mentions the method of automatic writing where an author creates a character and lets them be an agent for change in their fictional world. When you instill a character with the agency to be who they are and do what they will, they become fully realized beings |

£| This trilogy was written by the author Cornelia Funke; "Inkheart", "Inkspell" and "Inkdeath". We're in the process of re-reading these masterful works, now with a much better sense of understanding of what it was in those books that awakened our latent magic. |