The Sense of Reality as a Transparent Background of Experience

This article examines the sense of reality as a normally transparent background of experience rather than as a property of perceptual content alone or a reflective judgment that the world exists. Using derealization as a revealing case, it argues that the world can remain perceptually structured and behaviorally navigable while losing its ordinary felt presence. Drawing on phenomenology, active inference, interoceptive models, and recent clinical research on depersonalization-derealization disorder, the paper distinguishes among content, perspective, and realness. It proposes that felt reality depends on the embodied stabilization of organism-world relations across perceptual, affective, and bodily domains, including vestibular grounding. The article offers a conceptual framework for understanding both ordinary world-presence and its disruption in psychopathology.