Great thread, mrdevious.

There are a lot of things that we tend to confuse semantically, and I think one of the things that's most often confused (in the western culture that I'm familiar with, at least) is the concept of reality.

Take, for instance, our senses. Now, not even taking into account all the energies that we can't perceive through our senses, they are still quite imperfect -- that is, what we experience is always removed from the apparent 'reality' that we are sensing. By the time the light emanating from your monitor is decoded into symbols that represent words, your senses are already taking in new information. What you're seeing is not 'real' therefore, but a memory, a reflection. No matter how you redefine your idea of what is real and what is not, your definition is flawed because nothing that isn't real in some way can exist.

Reflections can be distorted until unrecognizable -- just like you are a reflection of your parents but may not look much like them, and your dreams are reflections of your perceptions of waking life, though they seem different. Just because they are reflections doesn't mean they aren't real, or any less significant.

Say you look at yourself in a mirror. You think, "I'm real. The reflection is not real." The reflection can't be 'you' because you define yourself by the boundaries that seemingly separate you from the rest of the world. Remove these definitions, and you will realize that both yourself and the image in the mirror are just different reflections of the same information.