Tolkien is real. Is reality shaped by stories?

This morning, I went to https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ for a randomly selected /x/ thread. I got one of those iceberg memes where the conspiracy theories get crazier and crazier the deeper you go.

I scrolled down to the bottom, and one of the items immediately jumped out at me:

"Tolkien is real." It is, after all, a pretty crazy idea, but I happen to know several people who subscribe to it to one degree or another. Two days ago, on April, 29, Leo posted this in "The Power of The":

“He said ‘the’ angel, not ‘an’ angel, just like I was saying before about ‘the Middle-earth'”

“So what?”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that the same odd ‘the’ usage that I just happened to annotate years ago would pop up within minutes of when I mentioned ‘the’ Middle-earth?”

“What does that prove?”

“That I’m right. About everything. Elves are real.” (This was a shocking leap in logic, even for someone so detached from reality as me and we all laughed.)

About a week before that, on April 20, I received an email that said, among other things, "I presume you're still unconvinced on the 'Tolkien wrote partial nonfiction' thing?"

After getting "Tolkien is real," I clicked once more for another random /x/ thread and got this:

The text of the first three posts, which all seem to be by the same person, is:

Is reality shaped by stories? Can telling a different story change reality?

Do stories make a person who they are? Would telling my story differently make me someone else?

Are belief and reality interwoven? Does believing something make it more true?

If enough people believe, can reality be shifted?

I think these are all reasonable questions and have to do with our participator role in divine Creation. They are also of course relevant to the question of how Tolkien is, or could become, true.

Shortly before getting these two random /x/ threads, I had read Leo's latest post, "Worship, Hair, and Angels." He quotes a passage from the Book of Mormon insisting that angels will never cease to appear to men, unless and until faith has utterly disappeared from the earth, and comments:

And yet, angelic appearances seem to be quite rare. In fact, the only people I know of who claim such a visitation are people that I suspect are likely word smithing the idea, if not outright fabricating.

He goes on to relate a dream in which a woman delivered a message about worship. His wife proposed that this was an example of the sort of angelic appearance promised in the BoM, but Leo was somewhat skeptical.

This made me think of the "Angel" dreams of J. W. Dunne, the last of which you can read (as reported by Dunne's son) in my 2020 post "The Christianity of J. W. Dunne":

In the third appearance he described the scenery as having grown dark and stormy so that he could barely see the 'Angel'. In the fourth and final appearance it was pitch black with a raging tempest. All that he could see of the 'Angel' was a white something which he took to be his robe and which he caught hold of, for (here I quote his own words) 'I knew that it was the last time I should see him.' 

This Appearance was very brief and I think it took him by surprise. He said that he thought rapidly for some question to ask the 'Angel'. The question which had always worried him came out -- 'Christianity, is it true?' and the 'Angel' replied: 'God lets it be true for those who want it to be true.' 

He said that he had no interpretation of the 'Angel's' reply to his final question.

"God lets it be true for those who want it to be true" -- clearly similar to the ideas presented in the "Story magic" /x/ thread.