(Un)Reality

Literature is my passion.  It is in me and of me.  It is a place of refuge and deferral, a place where both existence and time comes under my control for a brief instant. It is place in which the horrors and the pleasures are housed together.  And it is a place where what is not said becomes more important than what is and has been. 

Does Literature have any practical use?  I'm not sure.  I'm not sure what is meant by "practical" or "applicable".  Or rather, I suppose what I mean is that I question the nature the world to which these things are being applied.  Literature may have no tangible application to the physical world.  You cannot physically alter the physical world in which we dwell through the application of those qualities found in literature.  But ideas have incredible power to dramatically alter the social and psychological landscape of man.  Literature is applied to unseen processes, to the Unreal.  But to understand the Real in which we physically dwell, we must first understand from whence our perception of it comes, and the only way to explore that perception is to acknowledge that perhaps the Real exists because the Unreal, the construction of narrative we put over it and in it before we can first experience it, gives it Form.  And if Literature can guide us to the Unreal through hinting at its nature through figurative language and divulging its existence through the inability to name and classify it but to only compare it, then is not that a practical application?