Dreams are basically simulations of our lives that we run, sometimes with different physical constants, resulting in different worldly behaviours. Fever dreams (not necessarily during a fever) are when we are sweeping over a range of constants, so behaviour keeps on changing.
According to some prominent theories, the world of our waking experience is itself a mental simulation of sorts.
There’s a related theory that dreams basically prevent this mental simulation from overfitting our experience, so our brains are always primed to accept the unpredictable.
That could explain my dream about setting up a projector in a room with a poisonous atmosphere, where everyone except me has a space suit…
Which vault was that again?
It was a dream about my actual last job.
I mean, the real world does actually exist. But we only experience a simulation of it, created by our brain based on data from our senses. So yes, we live in a simulation, but it does correspond to reality behind it.
we perceive a VERY small percentage of the “real” world