“How do you know that you are here” my friend Jeff asked as we sat in our favourite local Indian restaurant. “I don’t. I’ve experienced vivid dreams during which I’ve believed myself to be awake” I replied. My friend responded that there was no answer to that!

The above exchange got me thinking about what constitutes reality. If I believe an event to be truly happening that occurance takes on concrete form as for a moment, however brief I experience the firings of my dreaming brain to be the occurance of an event in real time. Consequently one may argue that dreams are real while we are caught up in our dreaming but what if we never wake? What about the person in a coma who spends months (sometimes years) dreaming? Are their dreams real? My tentative answer to that question is that one’s dreams are real while one is dreaming them.

One may object that once one awakes the dreamer knows the difference between the dream-like state and the experience of wakefulness but what of the person who believes themselves to have awoken but who has, in point of fact moved from one sequence of dreaming to another?

Ultimately we must all work on the basis that we are experiencing actual events rather than dreams. If We do not proceed on this basis then the world would fall apart. I, for example need to shower, have breakfast and leave for the office in the next hour or so, that is the reality of my current situation. Or is it? Perhaps I am dreaming and rather than it being Wednesday morning it is, in fact the weekend and I will awake in a few hours to find myself with Saturday and Sunday to enjoy away from the office or maybe not!