What is real?

It seems like this should be a non-starter for a question?  I mean "real" is the opposite of imaginary - isn't it?  The dictionary defines real as "actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed."  The real question is, in my mind, "how do you know something is real?"  When I hold my favourite pen or my coffee cup in my hands, they seems real.  In lecturing on topics related to quanta (very small), I found that people can believe in things that can be seen or touched but beyond that, many question the reality.   

As an example, I can have a person hold a pen and then I ask them if it is real.  Everyone says "yes".  I then ask how they know it is real, and most say because I can see it and I can touch it.  If I then ask them to close their eyes and I place the pen in front of them and ask them again, "Is the pen real?"  People usually say, "Yes the pen I saw is real."  But if you cannot use your sense of touch or vision - how can you know?  You have a memory which, when I ask you to think about a pen, you can conjure up a vision of pen and therefore it must be real? 

Our reality is shaped by not only what we touch, see, hear, taste, or smell but also by what people tell us is real.  As a child, you most certainly, remember believing in things that later turned out to not be real?  What changed with those beliefs of reality?  At some point most of ask for proof and if proof is not provided, we reject that which we formerly viewed as reality.  If somebody introduced you to a tooth fairy and you watched the tooth fairy in action, all over the world, depositing money under the pillows of children around the world, would you believe again?  

Think about something like long-term memory.  If I ask you to remember something from your childhood, and the details of your memory and not perfectly clear, you will likely embellish the details of your memory - the history changed.  is it still real?  Did all of that really happen?  What about deja vu?  Deja vu is the sense that you have experienced an event before when there is no plausible way that you could have experienced it.  Scientists have no explanation as to exactly why deja vu occurs but most people experience at least one episode in their life.  

Einstein was quoted as saying, "“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”   

Perhaps everything we view as reality is not actually real but rather a construct of our conscious minds.  Our limiting views of reality can interfere with the field of possibility.  If we believe that we have limited abilities - this will be our reality.  If reality is created by our own consciousness, then it stands to reason that, within indisputable laws of nature, reality is what we make of it; ergo, life is what we make of it. 

Brett