What is reality?

I’ve had dreams before that have left me baffled in the morning. Not ‘just dreams’, but so intense that I woke up and asked myself: What was that last night? The crazy thing is: some of them felt more real than what we call three-dimensional ‘reality’.

Have you ever experienced that yourself?

The colours were clearer. The surroundings were different from those in which you’d fallen asleep. And yet there were no negative feelings such as anger or fear.

Just like in a high-end HD cinema film. Except that this HD hasn’t been invented yet :)

Once you’ve experienced it, it stays with you forever. You wake up and ask yourself: What’s actually real now?

I’ll be honest: I don’t have a ready-made answer. What I do have is this experience. And the curiosity to explore it, rather than brush it aside.

What I’ve discovered is that I’m not alone in asking this question. Nor am I the first person to ask it. People have been asking it for thousands of years.

Around 2,300 years ago, a philosopher called Zhuangzi is said to have lived in ancient China. There is a little story told about him. It goes like this: he dreamt that he was a butterfly. He fluttered about, felt completely like a butterfly, and knew nothing of a man called Zhuangzi. Then he woke up. And instead of feeling relieved, he sat there, at a loss. For now he no longer knew: am I a human being who has just been dreaming that I was a butterfly? Or am I, in truth, a butterfly who is currently dreaming that I am a human being?

A simple question. But let’s be honest: which perspective is THE ONE truth?

Or take Advaita Vedanta, a non-dualistic philosophy within Hinduism. It features the concept of Maya. This is a Sanskrit word and has nothing to do with the Maya people of Central America. In Advaita Vedanta, Maya is the creative force that deceives our perception. It lies like a veil over true, undivided reality, Brahman. Through this veil, we see life as a collection of separate things, forms and feelings of self. In this tradition, spiritual practice is undertaken specifically to see through this veil and realise that, at its core, everything is one.

But the same is true in Greece: there, the philosopher Plato spoke of people who spend their whole lives sitting in a cave, chained, facing the wall. Behind them a fire burns; in front of it, objects pass by; and all these people ever see are the shadows on the wall. For them, these shadows are the whole of reality. They know nothing else. Until one of them breaks free, turns round and realises for the first time that there is a whole world behind him.

And centuries later, a Spanish poet, Calderón, wrote an entire play with a title that says it all: *Life is a Dream*. Shakespeare, too, had a character say that we are made of the same stuff as dreams.

Different times. Different countries. People who have never met. And yet the same sense: reality is more permeable than it seems.

I think there’s something in that. At least in this sense: perhaps what we regard as the fixed, singular reality is more fluid than we think. More permeable. More malleable. It’s just that our analytical minds find it hard to grasp this.

Now here comes the objection that I hear myself, loud and clear: Prove it. Show me a measurement.

My reply to that: I can’t. Nor do I want to.

An inner experience is always subjective anyway. For you, for me, for every person. That is simply its nature. No one can look into your dream from the outside, measure it and thus understand it in the same way you experienced it. No one can measure your inner joy or the moment when a song really gets under your skin. And yet you would never doubt that it exists. It was real. For you.

I think that’s an important point. We’ve got into the habit of believing that only what can be measured is real. But things like deep anger, grief, love, meaning, that feeling of being in the right place – or the wrong one – none of it fits into a measuring device. And yet it’s still the most real thing we know.

What’s also interesting is that, for around a hundred years now, quantum physics has been at a stage where it is no longer so easy to define THE ONE, objective reality. That’s not the same as your inner experience, but it points in a similar direction.

But I carry the real question with me in my everyday life. And perhaps you’d like to do the same.

If ‘reality’ isn’t actually that real after all: how much leeway do you have? What would happen if you worked on your inner state? What would change in your life, in what you experience every day?

Perhaps more than you’ve ever been told.