What I’m saying is quite simple: If you have a dream (or a psychedelic experience, or any other non-ordinary experience) that satisfies all the reality-test criteria you apply to your sober, waking everyday life, then you would call it real. But it isn’t real – it’s a dream. So if we’re able to mistake a dream for reality, how can we say that reality isn’t a “dream”?

All we can really do is apply reality-test criteria to our experiences, and then place the experiences in a “real” or “not real” category based on the results of the test. There is no way to prove that anything is real.