Plato's Cave

Today we went over Plato, and one thing that I have always found interesting is his Allegory of the Cave. The idea that we are all in a cave, only seeing images against a wall, and never the real thing, and therefore can never reach enlightenment is very interesting to me. I don't actually agree with Plato, however, when he says that we shouldn't copy what we see and feel because it dilutes it's reality even more. If the only reality we know and understand is that which we see and hear, then does it matter if there is something beyond if we cannot comprehend it? Wouldn't the very fact that we perceive reality a certain way make it reality?

To make it more relevant, one could picture it as if they were solving a word search. One peers at a jumble of words for minutes, possibly even hours, seeing nothing that makes sense. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, they spot just the word that they have been looking for all along, and cannot understand how they didn't see it before. There is no cave. There is only the reality we perceive, and the reality we have yet to see. Yet until we see this new reality, the reality we know is the only reality that can be.