There are at least two kinds of experiences in the last description. The first one is the experience of perception. Examples of it are to see the dogs, to hear the seller of tangerines or to feel the warmth of the sun.  But sensitive perception does not exhaust the experience of perception. We have also perceptions of our own body, as to feel our breathing, to feel how we move our limbs or even to feel how pain rises from the pit of the stomach ─as well as to feel sexual pleasure or to feel hungry─. How then can we define the experience of perception? For now, we could say that the experience of perception can be defined by three aspects: 1. What is perceived: it is either an object of the external world ─that is, an object of which we can say that is not a part of myself─, or my own physical body ─that is, that part of myself composed by physical matter─. 2. The mean of interaction with that object: it is our sensitive body ─we se by the eyes, we hear by the ears, we touch by the skin and we feel pleasure and pain by the secretions and connections of our nervous system [I use the preposition “by” to express causal dependence: due to the eyes, we see, due to the ears, we hear, etcetera. Is it the right preposition?]─. 3. The temporal dimension of the experience: both, the object of perception and the experience of perception itself, are always in the present moment.

The second kind of experience is the experience of remembering. All what I did when I evoked the past experience of the first interaction with my mother was to remember. The experience of remembering can be define by the three aspects defining of the experience of perception: 1. What is remembered is not an object of the external world nor my own body, but a past experience of perception. As a perception is always a current experience, when a perception finishes, it becomes in a memory. The memories exist only in our own mind. Therefore, what is remembered (that is, the object of the remembering experiences) are contents of our mind. 2. The mean of interaction with that object are not our senses or our nervous system, but the neural system, which is in charge of activating every mental content. 3. In the temporal dimension the experience of remembering itself is in the present moment, but the object of that experience refers to past experiences of perception: we remember now something that has happened.

Now the content of the thoughts of the act of interpretation of my neighbor’s face seems not to fit in any of those two kinds of experiences. I am not seeing the thoughts of my neighbor, as when I see a dog in the street, and I am not remembering a past experience of perception of his thoughts. Indeed, perceiving the thoughts of anyone is impossible because they are not physical objects of the world. So, it must be a third kind of experience, whose object is the genre comprehending of the content of the thoughts of an act of interpretation. There is a kind of experience whose only difference with the experience of remembering is the content of its object of reference. That is the experience of imagination. As in the remembering, in the imagination the object of reference ─what is remembered or imagined─ is a content of our mind. The image is different of the memory by the way it is constituted. While the content of the memory is only a passive creation because I do not need doing anything to create it ─but it emerges by its own from an experience of perception─, the content of the image is an active creation of the self ─because to create it I must take a content, either mental or external, and vary it or match it with another content: we perceive or remember something and then we wonder how would it be if…?─. That is how all the fantastic creatures existing as unicorns and sphinxes were created. Otherwise, the experience of imagination has the same mean of interaction with its object as the experience of remembering, because that mean can only be connections made by the neuronal system. But on the other hand, the imagination has the same temporal dimension as the experience of perception, because both its object of reference and the experience itself are in the present moment.

Said that, we can explain the difference between these three kinds of experiences by the temporal dimension of the object of reference and the origin of the content of that object. Perception refers to a current object whose content’s origin is in the physical world; remembering refers to past object of perception, whose content’s origin is, of course, in a past experience of perception; and imagining refers to a current creation of my mind, whose content’s origin is either in a memory or in a current object of perception. This distinction, however, is not enough to explain the difference between these three kinds of experiences. We should add to it the distinction between the role of the self of each kind of experience. To perceive the self should do some basic activities, as bodily movements, but the self remains passive in the most part of the experience. When we see or hear or touch, we only receive dates from the world. Of course, the origin of perception is always an activity: opening the eyes, reaching your hand, being at a certain distance, etcetera. But once we are perceiving, the activity of the self is minimal. To remember the self can take both an active or a passive position. It is active when I make the memory emerge. For example, if a friend of mine talk me about a person who I don’t remember, I will try to evoke the memory of him voluntary. It is passive when the memory emerges by its own. For example, when I walk through a street that is very similar to the street where I used to play football when a child. In that case I don’t want to remember anything, I am just walking and seeing, and a current perception wakes up a memory by the affinity of content. The same happens when we imagine. Sometimes we voluntary create fantastic objects in our mind, as when we see a dog in the street and we imagine it with a tail of fire. But sometimes the imagined object is not a voluntary creation. It just emerges, as when we are brokenhearted and it seems that from the sadness appears the image of our ex-girlfriend having fun with her friends. We didn’t create that image; it just appeared without our consent. Now we can conclude that the difference between these three kinds of experiences can be expressed in the following way: whereas perception is a mostly passive experience referred to a current object arose from the physical world, remembering is either an active or a passive experience referred to a past object of perception and, consequently, arose from a past experience of perception; imagining is either an active or passive experience referred to an actual object arose from an object of actual perception or a memory.