Life is Just a Dream

We generally consider our waking life to be a serious and real thing whereas we think of dreams to be completely illusory. Our attitude defines a vast chasm between these 2 different realities we all inhabit. We generally find that our waking life is consistent from day to day, unlike our dreams. Our dreams are usually quite varied and different night to night. One night we're being chased by demons, the next night we're surfing with Jesus. We can agree on our collective understanding of our waking life, we all reach consensus. We can agree on past and present events that we all experience. We also find consistency from day to day. One day we're stuck in traffic going to a crappy job, and the next day we're stuck in traffic going to a crappy job. So we consider it to be more real and valid than our dream life.
However I expect that there are others out there like me who've experienced breaks and violations of the laws of dreaming. Dreams aren't always inconsistent. And they're not just a personal experience. Let me share with you some examples. Just last week I was having a dream where I was hanging out with an old friend. I decided to take him to a local bar/club near where I grew up. It was right down the street from where my mother lives. I'd been there before and was telling him what a fine place it was. When we got there we found that it was just as I had told him and I was lucky enough to meet the manager. I'd always wanted to meet the manager and tell him what a fine place he ran. When I woke up, I remembered that there is no such place in the city. But in the dream I had remembered the place clearly and remembered having had some good times there. The memories however were from other dreams. I can remember about 3 or 4 times I'd been to that place in different dreams.
Theres another very similar place which exists only in my dreams. There is this large Hilton Hotel on the corner of Sunset Blvd and La Cienega in Los Angeles (my hometown). It has a beautiful fountain in the front and a lavish lobby with lots of cool art. I'd visited this hotel in a few different dreams in varying capacities. In the "real" world theres just an old office building there. But when I'm dreaming, I always remember this hotel quite clearly and love to go there.
We also dismiss dreams because they seem to be a private matter that is unshared. Well Ive had a few shared dreams with other people. I know I'm not the only one to go through this. I know a few other people, usually couples who've shared dreams. The nature of the dream does not really matter. The point is that we were able to verify the shared aspects of where we had been in dreamspace. Vanilla sunset skies, giant mountains floating in the clouds, crystal cathedrals on the tops of the mountains, and giant waterfalls crashing down into the fog. It was all specific enough to convince me that it was not a coincidence.
Of course there is enough strangeness to write many many books on dreaming. When I was young, I had a really cool lucid dream. I realized in the dream that it was a dream and decided to fly over the neighborhood. I saw into peoples back yards and saw that a number of my neighbors had swimming pools. There were more than I would have guessed. So the next day when I was awake, I went around peeping into peoples back yards. Sure enough, the folks that had pools in the dream had pools in the waking life.
I cant say that I know enough to draw any particular conclusion from this except to say that our most basic understanding of dreams is completely wrong. Any scientist who tells you that its all in your head or just chemical reactions has no idea what they're talking about. If you've ever studied astral projection, shamanism, or Carlos Castaneda, you're lucky enough to have heard some alternative explanations for dreaming. I don't want to spend all day paraphrasing all that since that information is already out there online. If I had to make a guess as to what is going on, Id say that we live in a thought responsive cosmos. While awake, we live in a collectively created and shared reality. While asleep, we cross the boundaries between individually created realities, and collectively created realities.
The Samurai used to have a saying that when you have a nightmare, you can easily console yourself by telling yourself " it was just a bad dream", and that the same consideration, can just as easily be extended to your waking life.