Imagine you go to bed tonight, and each night after, and enter into the same, continuous, cohesive, coherent dream world. It remains as apparently constant, unchanging, and “objective” as our own waking world does. In other words, you’re living in two consistent worlds which you alternate experiencing (as opposed to one consistent world + lots of less consistent, less predictable worlds).

In this dream world, you’re aware that you’re dreaming, and that when you go to bed in the dream world, you’ll wake up in the “real” world. The other folks in the dream world, though, are exactly like the folks in the waking world. In fact, the so-called-“dream world” and the so-called-“waking world” are just about identical. You experience both as a fleshy being living on a planet, eating, sleeping, communicating, laboring, playing, etc. You’re Bob the Human on Earth half the time and you’re Flob the Fluman on Flearth the other half of the time. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that you didn’t start dreaming about Flearth until now, you’d probably not know which one was “real”!

Question: What kind of lifestyle do you adopt on Flearth, where you know you’re dreaming? Do you watch Flearth TV shows, go to a mundane Flearth job, pay your Flearth bills, fill up Flearth trash cans, buy Flearth products in Flearth Flal-Marts, eat Flearth animals, etc.? Do you spend your time on Flearth doing about 90% the same thing as everyone else on Flearth? Or, maybe, do you try to solve world hunger, end wars, spread peace, etc.? Or, maybe, do you become a genocidal warlord? Prime minister? Sports star? Ascetic? Billionaire?

I pose this hypothetical because I want to know to what degree you put your money where your mouth is. If you really do experience the Earth, with all its capitalism, warfare, environmental destruction, overpopulation, etc. as a dream world, how does that influence the way you interact with it? Are you more, or less, compelled to help other people/civilization and society as a whole? What does that do to your ambitions and aspirations? Because there certainly does seem to be -something of a contradiction (and that may be a strong word) in living a totally mundane and ordinary life, nearly entirely identical to that of any conventional physicalist, if you’re awake to the fact that it’s all a dream. (There are some metaphysical arguments against this which are perfectly valid, but I’ve got that gut feeling and I’m standing by it.)

We talk a lot about contemplating, metaphysics, and dealing with very specific situations on this sub, but very little about the things that we likely spend the vast majority of our human lives doing. How does subjective idealism influence your life choices? What obligations do you feel toward being a human, other humans, human society, etc.? Do you have animosity toward mainstream culture or do you enjoy it? Are you all logging out of Reddit and turning on reality TV, or are you sitting in fallout shelters in the dark all night?

It’s not unlike that famous story from David Foster Wallace where the two fish are swimming along and an older, wiser swims by and says, “Hey boys, how’s the water?” And after a while, one of the two younger fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell’ ‘water’?” As oneirosophers, in theory, you’re aware that THIS IS WATER. So, I’m literally asking you, “How is it?”

At the end of the day, this is your playground, right? I mean, this is basically here for you to play in (with the implications of play/fun not being limited to sheer pleasure). It’s game-like in nature. Are you treating it that way? If not, why not? Are you having fun? Does this life feel playful? Is there any gap between what you “feel like you should be doing” and what you are doing, day in and day out? Are you happy with this current life experience?