What if there was another level of being awake, where you realize the physical world is also a dream? A physical dream.

The world is illusory.
Brahman alone is real.
The world is Brahman.
-Ramana Maharshi

Thinking of reality as a dreamscape hardly sounds like science, but this is essentially what the founders of quantum mechanics discovered a century ago. Our modern physics community has yet to advance this culturally uplifting discovery despite how the last hundred years of experiments have only confirmed that consciousness is fundamental—all there really is.

Peter Russell | The Reality of Consciousness | YouTube 38:21

This is going to sound strange, but it shouldn’t. Consciousness is the only medium in which time flows. The physical world we know, including space and time, only exists as qualia in conscious experience, and otherwise is just a quantum sea of information, not in space or time. We make time (spacetime) in our own experience.

And there are plenty of other clues that this is a consciousness-based reality. Some are more obvious, like how the moon perfectly eclipses the sun, or the miracle of child birth, but there’s also many more subtle hints to find along the way. Like how the universe is so precisely tuned for life, or how spiral galaxies are vortices yet spin like wheels, or the impossible migration of nerve cells in a developing brain, or how epigenetic memories can pass through our single-cell life stage. We accept the world we are born into, but saints, scholars, and scientists have devoted their lives to a more clear-eyed view, and this is what they are telling us.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
–Albert Einstein

In a dream, we look out into the dreamworld from a first-person perspective and interact with other people, and upon waking realize we were actually all the people and objects of the dream. It’s the same with the physical world. Our individual selves are just disassociated parts of our own universal consciousness looking out into the same dreamscape. The world appears the same to everyone because we’re all in the same dream. Sometimes people wake up from the dream. We call them saints and sages.

Our consciousness has been compartmentalized down into individual egoic selves, and meditation helps us to re-associate with our true Self (the dreamer). When we look out into the world, it’s confusing, because everything is inside out.

Shakti opens her eyes and the universe is reabsorbed in pure consciousness; she closes them and the universe is manifested within her. -Spanda Karika

Modern science has long confirmed all this. Consider these quotes from notable physicists of the early to mid 1900’s:

Where does Space-Time come from? Is there any answer except that it comes from consciousness? –John Wheeler

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. –Max Planck

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in
physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely
fundamental. –Erwin Schrödinger

The very study of the physical world leads to the conclusion that the concept of consciousness is an ultimate reality. -Eugene Wigner

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. –Sir James Jeans

How is this different from what the saints and sages (meditators) have been saying for millennia?

In the absolute sense, subject and object are nothing other than the space of profound consciousness. -Spanda Karika

Universal consciousness is the cause of the universe. -Pratyabhijna Hrdayam

Matter derives from mind not mind from matter. –Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

The world you perceive is made of consciousness: what you call matter is consciousness itself. -Nisargadatta

What appears as a world of apparently external phenomena, is the play of energy of sentient beings. -Pratītyasamutpāda

The world in which we live is a play of universal Consciousness.
-Swami Muktananda | Play of Consciousness

Consciousness is everywhere, there is no differentiation…What you call universe is an illusion, a magical appearance. To be happy, consider it as such. -Vijñāna-bhairava

[Buddha said,]
My dreamlike form
Appeared to dreamlike beings
To show them the dreamlike path
That leads to dreamlike enlightenment.
-Bhadrakalpa Sutra

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According to relativity and quantum mechanics, the nature of the universe is built around the observer. So why is today’s scientific view so antithetical to the primacy of consciousness when their own data has revealed it to be so? One reason may be because in the 1700’s, science claimed authority over the church as purveyors of the highest truth, and relativity and quantum mechanics calls all that into question. The smart thing for them to do now is to continue trying to falsify it, while avoiding any philosophical discussions, for as long as they can.

But the link to Eastern religion is obvious. Even the preeminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote about the Upanishads (from What is Life in 1944 to My View of the World in 1964). By the 1960’s, Hippies learned of these experiments, and ideas about vibrations and universal consciousness infused into popular culture, eventually becoming the New Age movement.

After these conversations with Tagore, some of the ideas [from the Upanishads] that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.
–Werner Heisenberg

Saying the universe only exists in the experience of it is an extraordinary claim, but after a century of trying to disprove it, science has amassed an extraordinary amount of evidence in favor of it. It’s time now for scientists pull their heads out of the sand and move on. But when they do, old hippies will say, we told you so, and so will the church.

Just as quantum mechanics revealed the subjectivity of matter and energy, relativity revealed the subjectivity of space and time. You might say, physics is now investigating Kant’s noumena—the substrate of reality we weren’t meant to see. What insights can be gained by this?

Below is a beautiful NOVA documentary highlighting an experiment that went to the ends of the known universe to rule out local hidden variables (hidden variables are a last-ditch effort of the materialist view). Why go to such trouble? Because, saying there’s a quantum realm which gives rise to space and time, but only when observed, is an extraordinary claim, and they needed extraordinary evidence.

Einstein’s Quantum Riddle | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS | YouTube 53:18