SPIRITUALITY

What if This So-Called Reality is Just a Dream?

Let’s explore this idea and see if we can find some indications this may be the case.

11 min readFeb 15, 2024

Image created by “AI tool Microsoft Bing Image Creator powered by DALL·E” — the author has the provenance and copyright.

Not yet a Medium member? Please consider becoming one and show support for us writers. In the meantime, I’ve got you covered.

When we first encounter the idea that our reality might not be “the reality,” we struggle with the idea that something could feel this real and ultimately be an illusion, a simulation, a dream world. Dreams are an interesting analogy for this mental exploration. Let’s open our minds, suspend disbelief, and do some mental exploration.

Dreams feel real when we dream.

Can you remember a time when you were so caught up in a dream that you were feeling all sorts of visceral emotions? Fear, excitement, dread, joy? Is it not true that when we have one of those nightmares, they feel very much real until we wake up? The danger, monsters, people, and stakes seem real while we’re dreaming. We want to escape, fight, and survive by all means necessary.

I’ve been plagued with dark dreams of being hunted or having to fight for my life dreams all my life. You know what was the best thing about them? Waking up and realizing it was all just a dream. I’m not really in danger. The monsters from my nightmares aren’t real. They can’t hurt me. Funny enough, my perception used to take a while to adapt to this new reality. I often couldn’t immediately switch from the dream state to the waking state.

Dreams of such a visceral nature illustrate one thing very clearly — during a dream, we are unable to separate reality from the dream state. We perceive dreams as reality. There is no separation. We aren’t aware we’re just dreaming. It seems and feels very much real. Keep this in mind as we delve deeper.

The takeaway is that you can’t distinguish a dream from reality while trapped in the dream.

In a dream, people, things, and situations have a mind of their own.

We know that when we dream, there are no other people involved. Yet, they talk, think, and act as if they are complete personalities. Do they not? Things happen seemingly completely out of our control, but we know we’re the ones writing the script. It’s our dream.

Isn’t this fascinating? We could meet hundreds of people, visit countless environments, and meet with infinite random situations while dreaming. To us, the dreamers, it would seem like we have no control over them. Even people seem real. They have their own desires, fears, intents, and personalities.

But we know they don’t. It’s just our dream. We made them who they are somehow. Whatever they do, even the most horrible things imaginable, proper nightmare stuff, is still all our doing!

If we meet a horrible person who attacked and killed us in a dream, we feel like a helpless victim. Are we, though? It’s our dream. We created that person and his drive to murder us, and we made it happen. We cause everything in a dream. It is true, though, that we do not consciously control our dreams. At least most of the time.

How are dreams created?

We can agree that we — our minds at least- create our dreams, yes? The good, neutral, and the bad? Good. We’ve also established that we have little to no control over our dreams while dreaming. We are often victims of our own dreams. What is the process, then?

Dreams are residue thoughts, containing what we think about most of the time, combined with our biggest fears, desires, beliefs, and attachments. They also like to replay things we felt or saw before bedtime that had an emotional impact on us, like watching a horror movie, and then having a nightmare. We don’t directly control our dreams because our mind plays out these scenarios on its own. When we dream, we don’t control the dream.

“Aha!” I hear you protesting. “So it’s not us creating the dreams, it’s our mind.” Great point, good Sir or Madam. What is this mind you speak of? Don’t you identify with your mind? Is this some external entity, or is it “you”? If you can’t control your mind and if it does things you don’t want, what is it then? Something to ponder today, my friend. Seems rather important.

So, dreams are created by our minds as a byproduct of what we think about the most. They run automatically, without our conscious input - even the most atrocious ones! This is important. They stem from our subconsciousness.

We have no direct control over dreams, but with our input during the day (and life), we influence what our minds create for us when we dream. Our minds create whole worlds, people, and situations without our awareness of it, all by their lonesome selves. A calm, happy mind will produce good, pleasant dreams. A troubled, scared mind will most likely produce less-than-desirable dreams. Make sense, yes?

Our influence over our dreams is limited to controlling and managing our minds before we go to sleep. After that, it is what it is, and we’re just along for the ride. In a dream world that seems just as real as this reality, we are often the victim of randomness and coincidences.

It would now make sense to say that these coincidences are a lie. Wouldn’t it? If we go to sleep and are being chased by a werewolf (been there, done that), it’s not because a random human got bit by a werewolf and is now turning into a monster every full moon. It’s because we thought about werewolves, or being chased by a monster (could be some person we’re afraid of), and our minds created an experience matching our mood or thoughts.

This is so important to understand.

Let’s sum up what we’ve established regarding dreams thus far:

When we dream, we can’t distinct reality from a dream. We are convinced that dreams are our current reality.
We don’t directly control our dreams when we dream. It seems like the people, things, and situations have a mind of their own in our dreams. They feel like real, separate people, but we know they’re just a product of our minds. They’re not real, though they feel real.
Our minds create our dreams, along with everything in them. The good and the bad. We’re never the victim in our dreams of other people of forces. It’s us, or better, our mind, that is at the cause of everything.
We can indirectly influence our dreams by controlling the input of our minds through what we watch and think about during our waking hours. We can also instruct our minds on certain ideas for our dreams, and sometimes, it will oblige. Again, what is this mind thing?

What if our reality is just another dream?

Let’s connect these ideas with the concept of this reality being nothing more than an illusion, a mental projection, a simulation, a game, or a dream.

If this is all just a really elaborate and detailed dream or a simulation, we would never know it’s not the ultimate reality, until we stepped out of it. Until we die, most likely. Game over. Perhaps we then unplug from the matrix and wake up to the actual reality. Or is it just a dream one level up?

We’ve always lived within this dream. Everything we know is in this dream. People, animals, and situations all seem to have a mind of their own. Good and bad things happen to us, seemingly randomly and by coincidence.

By the way, are there true coincidences in your dreams? Random events that have nothing to do with your or your mind? Random people, you don’t know? No, right. It’s impossible because your mind created the whole dream world and everyone in it. If something happens in your dreams, it’s because your mind caused it to happen.

It’s no different from what you believe is the real world.

What you believe, think, and feel strongly about is manifested in this “reality.” Always. Without exceptions. Non-stop. You don’t directly control it like you don’t control your dreams. You also can’t stop the process. It’s automatic and ongoing. But you can influence it by managing and changing your mind. Reach the subconsciousness, implant new ideas, and it will paint a new picture in this thing you call reality. Heal old traumas, and the same vicious situations will stop repeating themselves. Change what you think about and how you think about things, and it will be reflected in your so-called reality.

There is no going back once you see these patterns all around you. Once you connect the dots, deliberately experiment, and prove to yourself beyond the shadow of a doubt that your mind influences your perceived reality, you understand that this thing we call material reality can’t be separate from us, our mind, and material in the first place. Otherwise, we couldn’t influence it with our minds and emotions in the slightest. But we do. We really do.

Take a pen and write down the things you fear, worry about, and think of the most. These are the things that will manifest in your life overwhelmingly. Yes, desires manifest as well, but when we’re afraid, it’s a much stronger emotion than we desire something. We also think about it more often. We just can’t stop ourselves. Desire also translates into a lack of the desired thing, so more lack you get, but that’s another story altogether.

Understand this — the causes of everything are mental.

It’s no different than watching a horror movie and then, during the night, having nightmares on the subject. Observe these patterns. Notice how different people have completely different mentalities, energy, and beliefs. It’s like they live in their own separate world. Their own dream.

Put simply

If you spend a lot of time worrying about disease, you will constantly get sick. Input-output.
If you worry about not having enough money, you will constantly struggle with financial issues.
If you worry about getting into an accident, you will get into an accident.
If you believe making money is easy, it will be easy for you, and money will pour into your lap.
If you believe relationships are easy, loving, and calm, they will be - for you. Those with a different set of beliefs will have a different experience.
If you believe you can do something, you can. If you believe you can’t do something, you can’t.

I’m sure you know the game.

Like I said, my writing is not for those of you delving into the mind thing for the first time. You’ll probably start with some Law or Attraction teachers, then move to old religious texts, realizing they’ve been teaching the same thing all this time, and ultimately, you will come to the realization that if the mind controls this reality to such a degree, this cannot be the “material separate reality” we perceive it as. Perhaps it’s a dream. Perhaps it’s a video game, a simulation. Perhaps it’s just the one mind playing around with ideas. All I know is that nothing else explains the things I’ve seen and experienced.

As within, so without. And for that to work, there can be no outside. The mind is all.

But what about other people?

Aren’t they real, I hear your questions. This question is only relevant if you consider us separate beings, minds, and creatures living in an object reality. If you see us all as one, one mind, one universe, one god, one being, then we’re all just playing in the same sandbox, dreaming, pretending to be separate but ultimately connected beyond our understanding. Let’s call it a multiplayer dream, then.

In the old scriptures, it was said: “I am the alpha and the omega. The first and the last. Beginning and the end. There is no one that is not me. I am is everything.” Now, I’m not a “God” person, so I don’t like using this terminology, but let’s stick with it for a minute.

If God is all and God is good, then God is everything and everyone. That also means everything and everyone is good, perfect, and Godlike - Godlike in nature and ability. We are all one. We create this dreamworld we believe is reality.

Aren’t we Godlike in our dreams? Don’t we create everything there? Isn’t everyone and everything just our mind replaying ideas from our waking hours? Are we then not literally “the alpha and omega, beginning and end, the first and the last in our dreams?” There is no one but us or our minds when we dream, but it appears that we live a life among other people full of randomness, danger, and various situations beyond our control. We know that’s an illusion, a lie, when it comes to our dreams.

Is it really so hard to believe this so-called reality could be just a form of dream?

A detailed, consistent, all-encompassing dream, but still just a dream? How would we ever know the truth? I guess we’ll find out when we wake up, won’t we?

Untill then, we can explore the idea from within the dream. Experiment, search for patterns, and journal your discoveries. I once counted over two hundred things I’ve manifested intentionally. Big and small. Good and bad. It was a great practice, as I could always revert to it when facing doubts, revealing the cause and effect of things in my life. The other file I ran at the time contained my observations and connections, patterns I noticed with other people. It was an even bigger list. Only after you see the world from the perspective that “the mind is all” does it make perfect sense.

One more idea before I end this post. When we dream, we perceive and believe that we are our body and mind. Don’t we? We identify with it. It’s not true. It’s fake. A movie our mind plays as we sleep. This we know, but it feels true when we dream.

Is it possible that this body you inhabit right now and this mind you identify with could similarly be an illusion?

A game character. A dream body. Something we believe is “us” when we dream, but upon waking up, a whole new world opens up to us. Is it not possible that while it feels real, it’s just a dream, and we’re still dreaming? Is it not possible that what we identify most closely with, our body and our mind, is not the real us, but something we use, play with in this illusion, dream, game?

This train of thought has a positive consequence, even though you probably don’t yet see it.

If this body and mind aren’t the real us, what is?
If this world is just a dream, what lies beyond it?
If we die in this dream, like in any other dream, doesn’t that mean we simply wake up somewhere else and aren’t dead in the final sense?
Could death now become less tragic of an idea but more of an exciting adventure into the unknown, a world and identity beyond this dream?

I’m not advocating to rush getting there. Far from it. We have much to explore and experience in this life first. But fear of death is an insanity. We will all die one day. Every single one of us. Death is inevitable. Fear of death, however, is utterly pointless and optional. One more thought on that. It is said that all fear originates from the fear of death. Diminishing it can therefore only be beneficial for you.

Dream a little dream for me, dear one!

Do you want to read more related posts?

You’ll find them here. Below are a few recent posts.