I notice I’m irritated reading your comment, and I imagine you’re spending a lot of energy spinning a big story in your head so you don't have to feel whatever is going on in your body right now.
When I read what you wrote, here is what I notice:
You take the simple, physical reality of air coming in and out of your nose and turn it into a giant, complicated cosmic drama about pineal glands, DMT realms, and dimensional mapping. You're sitting in a chair, typing on a screen, breathing actual oxygen, and I imagine your mind is flying off into outer space while your butt stays right there on the cushion and your belly holds whatever tightness or fear you aren't paying attention to.
When you ask, "What really is reality?", my guess is you’re using that question to avoid being right here, right now. It seems a lot more exciting and special to talk about "other-worldly realms" or whether life is a dream than to just sit in a room and notice the plain facts of your current physical experience.
You say that declaring physical reality as 'reality' is "a little ignorant," and that people who trip on psychedelics or do extreme breathwork "have a better understanding." When I hear that, I imagine you’re trying to feel superior by placing your mental concepts above simple sensory awareness.
To me, a hallucination—whether from a plant, a chemical, or hyperventilating until your blood chemistry changes—is just imagery playing out on the screen of your mind. It’s a movie. It’s more stories.
When someone breathes fast enough to make their hands cramp up and see colorful geometry, the physical fact is that their blood chemistry changed and their nervous system reacted. They didn't travel to another dimension; their physical body stayed right there on the floor having a physiological response.
You ask: "If one were born in a constant dream-like state... would their reality be considered the dream world?"
When I read that, my mind says: That's a hypothetical story that has nothing to do with this moment.
You weren't born in a constant dream-like state. You have a physical body with skin, bones, muscles, and lungs that take in real air. Right now, you are using a physical brain to write a theory about dreams.
My guess is your mind hates the ordinary simplicity of just being alive right this second. It invents grand, mystic theories to stay busy, trapped up in thoughts, endlessly debating what is "real."
I'm not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. But I can tell you what is physically here: your feet are wherever they are, your breath is moving or trapped in your chest, and your body is having whatever physical sensations it's having right now.
That sensory experience and reporting the truth about it is the only grounded reality available to any of us.
