Imagine that every night you can dream or live any life you want – not a fantasy, but a real one. With all the laws of physics, with people, with time passing naturally. You can dream about a moment, a day, ten years, or a whole human lifetime. Your dream can last as long as you want it to.
At first, it’s wonderful. You dream about the life you want – real, tangible, full of experiences. You love, work, make mistakes, experience beautiful or painful things. Everything seems so real that even when you wake up, you hesitate for a moment – was it really just a dream?
But over time, you get tired of it. You realize that without surprises, everything becomes boring. Then you start to let the unknown into your dreams – situations where you can’t control everything. People who don’t behave the way you want them to. Pain that you can’t just turn off. You want to experience life with all its dark sides.
And then something strange happens. You no longer know if you are really awake when you wake up. Maybe this “morning” is also a dream. Maybe the “life” you are currently living is just one of countless dreams that have dragged on.
Because if you can dream a moment or a lifetime, if time in a dream is just a feeling, how can you know that this isn’t the very dream in which you’ve forgotten that you’re dreaming?
You see the sun, smell the scents, hear people’s voices, think you are making choices. But maybe everything that is happening is just another dream that you yourself have chosen to live through.
And maybe when you “die”, you’ll just open your eyes and realize that it was all a long, real dream that you were so deeply immersed in that you could no longer distinguish reality from illusion.
So, before you say that you are awake, think: Are you really? Or are you just dreaming that you are awake?