Everything is made of stardust, including humans. If consciousness is a product of material processes in the brain, then its fundamental substance is stardust. From a biography of Jack Parsons, an occultist and rocket engineer, rocketry is compared to magic. Rocketry is how humans can make material objects and use them to explore the universe beyond Earth. Magic is almost the same, but it is related to abstract realms outside of the natural world.

Our body is confined to the ground by the force of gravity, and by using science, we resist that gravity to leave ground. The mind is also confined to the world of the knowledge that we have or are aware of. The force of "gravity" in this case may be "ignorance". We do not perceive what we do not want to explore. The material world as we see it through our eyes acts as a gravity to bind us to that state. We may believe in things we have not seen, maybe even illogical things without any evidence, but the brain works hard to stop us from going too far away from our surrounding reality.

Imagination is one way to escape the confines of reality. If you are a materialist and only believe in the existence of things that are tangible in some form, then everything immaterial is a result of imagination. Religion, spirituality, altered states of consciousness, meditation, stories, etc. Everything our mind shows us in its eye, that has no material form in the world around us, is imagination. So, the only method to escape reality in our mind is imagination. This may be materialized in the form of art, so that the abstract concepts the brain shows us take an almost material form, but on screen or paper only.

Of course, the confines may be tested to their extremes, because if the laws of physics or other natural sciences are not broken, almost anything that comes into your imagination as a thought can be translated into material form as is. Thus, we have fictional stories that can really happen in the real world, and other stories that are impossible. But our imagination, or whatever method we use to explore the abstract, goes beyond what we know to be possible in the material world.

Abstract science is worked in our minds only, but it may be possible in the material world too (for example, the concept of infinity). Belief plays an important role in defining our personal reality. So, for someone who is not a materialist, they don't categorize everything that is not tangible or that goes against the laws of the universe to be part of imagination. For some people, there really is a bearded man in the sky, running all things. Of course, this number gets higher the longer we go back into history. That tells us of the human inclination to fill in the gaps.

When ancient peoples looked at the great big sky or the high peaks of mountain tops, they were filled by a want to know. Because they couldn't reach those places, they had to make their own assumptions about what happened there. It doesn't only apply to the sky or remote inaccessible areas, but Earth at large in ancient times because it was unexplored. But belief has layers too, and the number of layers only increased the more humans understood the world around them. So, the concept may be a literal part of the material world, so that it is tangible and can be seen by everyone. Or it exists beyond the confines of time and space, so separate from the material world. It exists, it can influence the material world, but it's not tangible. But then there is another layer: it doesn't really exist, it certainly can't influence the material world, but a one-way communication may be possible.

The latter one relates to imagination, even for non-materialists. This "one-way communication", or in simpler words, thinking of the concept, can't influence the material world outside the mind, but it may influence the mind and thus consciousness. If consciousness is a result of material processes, it could be said that the abstract concept that has no form in the material world can affect the latter, but only partially within the confines of a mind. Even stories that you believe to be fiction can move you in some way. But these concepts have no tangible form in the material world, although one could materialize them into physical objects if they don't break the laws of natural science.

The effect of the concept is stronger the more real it is to you. For a higher layer of belief, such as religion, people who believe in it as fact may be influenced by it more than they are by concepts they believe to be fiction. But it doesn't mean that even they are not impacted at all by things they believe to be not real. This influence of both what an individual believes to be fact or fiction, regardless of its state in the material world, varies from person to person. The only things that can affect the collective or consensus reality, though, are the ones grounded. But the partial effect of immaterial things on the will of a person may not be ignored, since a conscious individual can still influence consensus reality with their hands to an extent.

Of course, this is obvious in the case of new ideas, that may drive a person to invent a physical thing or solve a problem. But in this case the individual is working directly on the idea or concept itself, thus it is not something fantastical or absurd that is beyond the confines of the laws of the physical world. On the other hand, the will of a person can still be influenced even by ideas or concepts outside the realm of time and space. It can be then said that abstract and absurd concepts, those that are impossible to materialize in a tangible form, can still to some extent affect the material world outside an individual mind through a person's will. Thus, not only do abstract concepts partially influence consciousness, but they can also partially influence the material world and so collective consciousness.