Have you ever been sitting around thinking, and all of a sudden a strange thought comes to mind, “Am I really here?” All of a sudden it’s like you can feel every part of your body, and your brain starts noticing things from a different perspective. I know what you are thinking. Hello, you are literally right there so of course you are really there. You are sitting right on your couch eating a turkey sandwich and checking your Facebook. Where else would you be? Really, you could be anywhere.

We’ve all seen those sci-fi movies where the person discovers that they are connected to a system that has created their whole life in their head. They thought that it was reality, but technically they weren’t really there. Likewise, we see movies where the whole movie plays out only to have the main character wake up from a dream realizing the whole thing was fake. What if we are in a virtual world? A matrix? A dream? Any day now the real us could wake up and find ourselves in a whole new world: the real world. Or would that be a dream too? There are so many layers to consider.

The idea that we are not really here is like Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat in the box is assumed both dead and alive at the same time until the box is opened, because until you open the box you have no proof that either scenario is correct or incorrect. Similarly, we can assume we are both here and not here, because we have no proof that we are in either place. It is rather eerie to think our reality could all be a ruse.

One could argue the point that we go to sleep each night and dream. If this was a dream then we would be going all “Inception,” having dreams within dreams. My thoughts lead me to wonder what if the dream we have here is us returning to reality or other realities. Perhaps we can travel to other dimensions because our brains are creating the worlds for us. Some say if this were a dream we’d feel no pain or that we’d be able to do extraordinary things. Maybe our brains still control the dimensions forcing certain aspects of the world to be prominent. In what we think of as our actual world, we feel pain and have limits on our abilities. But in another dimension we create, our brains have already determined what can and cannot be done there. If it is all in our head then there really is no limit to what rules our brain can make for each world.

As the saying goes if something is too good to be true it probably is. So why do we so easily accept that the university managed to develop perfectly creating the Earth in the perfect position, with the perfect amount of sunlight, and atmosphere content to support life? The Earth and it inhabitants are in a way too good to be true. Things don’t fit together this perfectly. No matter the arguments for how and why we got here, better yet is the argument on whether this life is realistic. Could this all be a test? A movie? A game? The Sims come to life? Maybe we are robots or dreamers or just brains in a vat. Are we even really here?