Quote Originally Posted by baseballmk92 View Post
Gigaschatten - have you read my message? I know it looks really long, but a lot of it is just me quoting you quoting me, if that makes sense. I didn't know how to multi-quote your message, so I ended up copying+pasting the things we'd said so that it was apparent what I was responding to. And, if nothing else, I'd still like a response to the last paragraph in that long message of mine.
Yes, I've read it but wanted to let it stand as it does, because I've pointed out my opinion already.

You want an answer to why I think that dreams are real?

First, what is meant by "real"? That you can see things, touch things, hear, smell and so on? That is true for dreams and several other states of consciousness.

Or is it that for things to be real they must additionally exist outside of our perception. But how would we ever know that?

You see, we cannot even define the word "real" in an universal way that excludes dreams and other states. Therefore it is illogical to say that something is less real than something else or not real at all.

You could try to go another way and say that dreams are illusions and imaginations. But what about waking life? Most of what we see is considered to be created by our brain, not the eye. That is what scientists tell us at the time. Personally I'd go a few steps further though. We can not even know that the brain or our own personality is not an illusion.

There is no way to assert that reality is actually real and not imagination. On the other side there is much evidence (optical illusions, global scaling, etc.) suggesting that what we have learned to consider "real" is an illusion.

So the question should not be why I think dreams are real, the question is why you think waking life is real.