So there’s this theory and it involves a snow globe.

Let’s start there with your globe. It's a dome that connects to the base of your foundation—your mental birthplace, your first thought. Now imagine this globe as your mind. All that happens inside this snow globe is a product of your doing. The layout, the sky, the weather, the environment, all of these are under your control. You are the ruler of this little world.

Yes. What I’m saying is, in fact, that we live in two worlds: one in our minds and one with our bodies. The snow globe is the world to which we retreat. It’s the vacation and the laboratory. It’s where we were born and where we go before dying. The snow globe is our home away from home. It’s how we find ourselves when we move onto a new chapter. It is our movable mind.

Plato claimed, “There is one world for the apparent and one for our senses.” In other words, there is reality and then there is the snow globe. Plato also claimed that our senses never change, further stating that the sensible world also does not change. What I am saying is that the snow globe, the true universe, as Plato called it, is the world where we can, in fact, change reality’s universals and replace them with our own. It doesn’t stop at our senses. Instead, it proceeds further, so that those senses can create another realm, one where we can live vicariously. It’s the world that we can control and therefore change as our senses evolve. One month, the globe could depict a snow-covered bar with a striving musician singing from within. And the month after it could feature a shepherd shielding his eyes in a wind-stricken desert. These scenarios are possibilities for the outside world.

So, what is the world beyond the glass ceiling? It’s the world that we have to share. It is a reality. Outside of the snow globe, there are other powers and other forces contradicting the lives we live within. This is a dual presence. It’s why we have escaped in literature and film. It’s why we have our snow globes. It’s so that no matter what state we are in—happy, sad, Alabama—we always have a world of our own, one where we are the changes.

It is important that we do not visit our snow globes for too long because they are only supposed to be temporary. We must use our mental architecture and return to the land of reality. We must envision the real world as our snow globes and start shaping our dreams as we saw them in our heads. In hindsight, we can now see that our snow globes were our solutions to everyday struggles. They cannot cure us fully. Instead, they can only be used as treatment. The complete cure for these struggles begins with our snow globe and ends with its application to the real world. Show us your snow globe, crack the glass ceiling and share your mind.