I see meaning (and really consciousness itself) existing in a similar way that software exists in relationship to hardware. There is little meaning in the physical hardware itself, none really that we can experience directly as humans. Nevertheless, the running software contains a lot of meaning, even if it's fleeting and that information is stored in different places by different physical parts. I think this is akin to the miracle of the emergence of meaning you describe. In that way, I think meaning is about as much fiction as software, which is to say it's both real and imagined (or abstracted if you will).