Peg...it seems to me that the operative parts of your answer are "If one believes.." and "..to imagine that .."

If one doesn't believe & imagine these things, what then?

In one place you say "I experienced it for myself." In another, you acknowlege what hallucinating can do...The point is not whether or not you had an experience (I don't doubt that you did!), but rather the real cause of that experience, and this unfortunately is not usually subject to verification.

There is a good reason to apply the principle of Occam's Razor to many of our experiences that are difficult to explain...but no one can insist that people do this, especially when some explanations are just clearly more 'interesting'.

I, myself, have had dreams that upset me, thrilled me, confused me and referred in strange ways to my concious life, but I have NEVER had one that could not be explained by random firing of neurological memories as my brain coped with it's stored patterns in different levels of sleep. Of course, I could find more complex explanations, and much more interesting ones...*grin*...but although they 'might' be true, I am constituted to need something pretty convincing.