Dreaming is not existence. Dreaming is, by definition, not reality - reality isn’t affected by dreaming at all. Dreaming is imagination believed. To say that dreaming is existence is one of the most notoriously false ideas, very popular in modern day spirituality, and it’s not true at all. It’s only true if we take the perspective of death - yes, from the perspective of death, the total annihilation, life is a dream, it doesn’t have existence, and everything you experience in life is a dream.

But I doubt people who say that life is a dream take this perspective. When this perspective is authentically embodied, being emotionally hurt by someone else’s opinion of you becomes, strictly speaking, laughable. Besides, this perspective is somewhat useless, it’s empty philosophy. So, life is a dream because we’re all gonna die, now what? What does it take away from it? Nothing. It’s also a perspective that can be applied to all life, not just your life. So all life is a dream, okay, all existence is a dream because non-existence follows it. So what? It preceded it, also! And for the same amount of time, too - eternity.

So, most of the people who say existence is a dream are, in reality, speaking about egoic existence. Most of them are still suffering, and can be even more sensitive to their own pain of existence than before. It’s the ego’s existence which is a dream, the ego doesn’t exist at all, it never has. It was imagined and believed, by you. And the ego is not your body, it’s the collection of all the nonsensical ideas about ourselves and how we should be and behave, as well as what we need from other people to finally become happy. It happens in you, but it’s not you. It’s a part of reality, it sits on top of it, but it’s not reality itself. And reality does exist, reality is simply that which doesn’t disappear when you stop believing it. Reality is stubborn. You can stop believing anything at all, and you will still need to eat if you want to survive.

Unfortunately, there’s a big difference between recognizing that your existence is a dream, and waking up from the dream. But it’s also not possible to wake up from a dream before you recognize that you’re dreaming. And thus, “wow, it is all a dream” is a necessary realization for anyone who ventures far enough on the spiritual path, and I made it also, and that was my perception of reality for quite some time. It can literally feel very dream-like, weird and eerie. But it’s also not the end of the path - from a certain perspective, it’s merely the beginning of the authentic spirituality. It’s a profound realization, and it changes a lot, but what follows, usually, is a very long process of separating what’s real from what’s not. Some people call it “shadow work”, some people call it “integration” or “alignment”. I call it the path from self-realization to enlightenment, the journey from recognizing that you’re dreaming to not dreaming and always abiding in reality. The recognition of the dreaming nature of the mind is extremely important though, because if you have recognized it, it means that the authentic, real part of you, which has been long forgotten, has waken up or is waking up - because what else would you recognize it with? A dream cannot recognize itself to be a dream.