Do you feel like waking life is a dream?

[Laurelindo]

One very powerful part of lucid dreaming is to imagine waking life as a kind of dream - and this makes sense since, when you think about it, waking life actually is a kind of dream, since our perceived reality is constructed in the exactly same way as dreams. Think about hallucinations, for example - they occur because your brain for some reason is having a problem to construct an accurate model of the world, and if you actually experienced the world itself directly then you would never ever hallucinate, since hallucinations don't actually exist in physical space - so waking life is all internally in our minds, even though the sensory input of course is real. This is pretty exciting and fascinating, and if you think of waking life this way then your surroundings will usually feel more dreamlike. So have you ever experienced a feeling like this for waking life? Sometimes I get into this curious state, when I observe things around me and feel like they are dream objects, and this also makes it easier to practice lucid living, since this feeling brings you closer to the feeling of being in a dream.

[Astaroth]

I felt that way even before hearing about lucid dreaming yet I don't know where the feeling comes from. At first it was neither fascinating nor exciting for me and even at some moments I don't like the sensation of 'fakeness', I don't really know how to explain it but it's kind of frustrating.

[k10kemorr]

Agreed. For a while after deploying to the desert, life felt somewhat fake, like a dream. Things were fake and too real at the same time. Lucid living, at least from what I understand, is appreciating everyday life, stories, and settings for the messages they give us as well as the beauty that happens around us that we normally pass off as background information. That being said I do appreciate real life much more now, having started to lucid dream. It's showed me that life is our perception and perspective.

[qacermacer]

I think this is known as de-realisation. I get it sometimes when I either think too much or whilst practicing ADA. I hate it yet like the fakeness at the same time.

[Laurelindo]

I think this is known as de-realisation. I get it sometimes when I either think too much or whilst practicing ADA. I hate it yet like the fakeness at the same time. It doesn't really have anything to do with fakeness, though. What I mean is that waking life is constructed just like dreams, so that even though of course most things you perceive in waking life does exist for real, it is the same content as dreams - your brain's attempt to piece together sensory input. I find this state of being highly meditative and strangely exciting.

[AnotherDreamer]

What is "real"?

[Fall]

Have you ever had a dream which you were so sure it was real ? -quoted from The Matrix