Do We Live Or Dream Through Reality?

When asking yourself the question, "Do we live in The Matrix?" you must first analyze how real you consider reality to be. The difference between dreaming while you sleep and living your everyday life while awake can sometimes be very subtle in the sense that you still recognize objects, locations and people. That's what makes dreams interpretable, their relation to your life as you experience it awake. The concept of reality is questionable though when you consider that these things you recognize may not be real. You may just as easily be encountering these things because you are relating them in your life to something you have only encountered in your dream.

In Socrates's "Allegory of the Cave" he argues that simply liberating the prisoner may not necessarily make him come to terms with reality by being liberated from his visual captivity. He has been fixed to only see shadows on a wall his whole life. Allowing him to see what caused the shadows may not even cause him to have a better understanding of the shadows. He may not recognize or even make a connection between certain objects and the shadows they cast because it has no basis in his reality as he knows it. His lack of acknowledgement of these objects does not make them any more or less real. In the same sense with things you know to be real because you encounter them everyday does not necessarily mean that if you were to better understand how they have come to exist you would accept it. Vice versa, if you were to encounter something in a dream that seems familiar from everyday life, and then were to come to realization that it's existence relies on something new or unknown to you would it shake up your view on it in your life awake? Or in essence do these things exist at all in dream or your everyday life?

You rely on your sences to regester what you are seeing and feeling. In Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy", he argues that our senses can be very deceptive. Perhaps even to the extent that you may classify things as real only because it has regestered as something familiar. You recognize things in your dreams because you know them well from your everyday life. Your take on reality is what you are basing these judgements on. In dreaming you have nothing to refrence a new idea or object to. Perhaps neither should be your reference considering your reality awake is based on your senses. Considering this basis on reality may be wrong as your senses can be deceptive the difference between dreaming and your life awake may not be so different at all. Or maybe you have no knowledge on the awake reality because you drift from dream to dream. Every session of being awake ends and begins with sleep. You dream while you sleep.