During my brush with death I fell into a coma and was forcibly kept there. I experienced dreams that were so vivid and real that I honestly have a hard time believing I had them at all. I had no doubt of what I was experiencing to be real. That reality, my place in it, and my experience of it was indistinguishable in character from the one I sit in now as I type this. I am reminded by Zhuangzi’s butterfly of which I pondered while younger but never truly appreciated until now – while he slept he dreamt himself to be a butterfly and he truly thought himself to be a butterfly, he fluttered around flowers and saw only as a butterfly could see, it was only upon waking that he realized that he was not a butterfly but a man- the natural question arises whether he is a butterfly dreaming of being a man or a man dreaming of being a butterfly. My experience differs though, it was so real that when I awoke, I still believed myself to be in a dream because for myself there was never a dream to begin with, all was a waking experience. The appearances, conceptions, and understandings, I forged in the dream were still so much apart of my waking perception that they continued to act as my lens and determined all. For three days I hallucinated a separate reality and thought it to be surely real as those who perceive it properly watched, studied, and continually explained to me where I was and what had happened. Or so they tell me, in all actuality they were hardly a part of my appearances and only bleeding in when my mind deemed it time to dream them up. Only on the fourth day upon waking did this hallucinating stop and everything was as it used to be.
I have struggled with the question posed, what is real and what constitutes reality, ever since. In some sense it seems nothing is real except for what you believe as my dream was so unquestionable that the validity of its reality could not be questioned. I really have no idea and sometimes cannot decide whether I am Alice or a butterfly.