From the moment we’re born, a veil descends — not as punishment, but as part of the plan. Across cultures and centuries, humanity has described this same forgetting: the angel’s touch, the river of oblivion, the dream that feels like life. Now, physics and technology are beginning to echo those ancient whispers. What if the goal was never to escape the illusion — but to awaken within it?
What if you didn’t wake up this morning — you logged in?
Every morning feels like a return to reality, but what if reality is simply the next level of the dream?From the moment we take our first breath, we enter a world that feels solid, immediate, and absolute. But across cultures and centuries, mystics, prophets, and philosophers have whispered the same unsettling idea: that what we call “reality” might be more like a dream.
A veil of forgetfulness descends as we arrive here, obscuring where we came from — and even who and what we truly are.
Forgetting as a Design Feature
In ancient Hebrew midrash, the angel Lailah guides the unborn soul into a body. Just before birth, she presses a finger to the child’s lips, erasing the memory of eternity. That forms the crease in your lip called the philtrum.In the Greek underworld, souls drink from the River Lethe to forget their past lives before returning to earth.And in Chinese myth, Meng Po waits at the Bridge of Oblivion, offering her soup of forgetfulness to each departing soul.
Across continents and centuries, humanity has described the same moment — the crossing from eternity into time and the leaving behind the memory of Home.Each of these stories points to the same paradox: forgetting isn’t a punishment, but a necessary part of being human. We enter this world not as omniscient beings, but as amnesiacs in search of remembrance.
Life as a Dream
The Hindu sages described existence as Māyā — a divine illusion, a dream woven by consciousness.The Buddha compared life to “a flash of lightning, a bubble in a stream, a dream.”In A Course in Miracles, the world is “a dream of separation” — we are not the figures in the dream, but the dreamer who has forgotten they are dreaming.
Many Indigenous traditions echo this. Among several Native American peoples, the waking world and the dream world are not opposites but continuations of one another. The Creator dreams creation into being. Our nightly dreams are reminders of that origin — glimpses through the veil.
Ancient Technologies of Illusion
When you look across these traditions, a pattern begins to emerge. The myths read like descriptions of ancient spiritual technology — devices designed to generate experience through illusion.
The veil, the river, the dream, the soup — each serves the same function. They are metaphors for an interface: a system that translates the infinite into the finite. They are the portal for consciousness to enter the game of life.
And now, in our own age, we’ve started building versions of it ourselves.
Our Modern Mirror: The Simulation
Put on a virtual-reality headset, and your brain begins to forget.
Your eyes and ears receive enough signals to convince you that you’re somewhere else entirely — another world, another body, another life. People stumble, run into walls, and feel motion sickness because their minds believe the illusion even though they know they are in a game.
If we can already simulate a world that fools most of our senses, what happens when we imagine a simulation that engages all of them — sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, even emotion and memory? Imagine your brain in a jar hooked up to neural inputs that stimulate sight, sound, taste, touch… how would you know the difference between being in that jar and what we call reality?
That’s the question behind simulation theory — a concept discussed not only in science fiction, but also by philosophers like Nick Bostrom, who proposed that if any civilization ever develops simulations indistinguishable from reality, then we are almost certainly living in one.
Does that sound familiar?
The myths of forgetting at birth, of drinking from Lethe, or tasting Meng Po’s soup, may not have been primitive superstition. They might have been early attempts to describe precisely what modern science is circling back to: that consciousness experiences itself through layers of simulated reality — and that forgetting is part of the protocol.
From the Cave to the Code
Long before headsets and holograms, Plato imagined a different kind of simulation.In his Allegory of the Cave, prisoners are chained in darkness, mistaking the flickering shadows on the wall for reality. When one finally breaks free and sees the sunlight, the truth is almost too bright to bear. He returns to tell the others, but they refuse to believe him — preferring the comfort of familiar illusions. Sound like an NDE?
Two thousand years later, The Matrix brought that same allegory to life through technology. Humanity sleeps in digital cocoons, dreaming a shared illusion crafted by intelligent machines. When Neo awakens, he must face the same disorienting revelation as Plato’s escaped prisoner: that the “real world” was only a projection all along.
Both stories are mirrors — one ancient, one modern — reflecting the same question:If the senses mediate everything we perceive, how would we know if we were dreaming? One character in the Matrix, the one about to sell Neo out, bargains that when he reenters the Matrix, he wants to remember nothing. He prefers the taste of the simulated steak in the fake restaurant to the actual gruel of the world
In the Cave, firelight projects shadows onto stone.In The Matrix, algorithms project experiences into the mind.And in our own lives, consciousness projects reality through the lens of perception.
Each version of the story points to the same truth: the moment of awakening isn’t about leaving the illusion behind — it’s about recognizing it for what it is.
Waking Up Inside the Dream
Every mystic and seer who has glimpsed beyond the veil says the same thing in their own language:
You are not just inside the dream — you are the dreamer.
Maybe the goal was never to escape the simulation, but to awaken within it. To remember what you are while still playing the game. To recognize that the walls, the sky, and even time itself are part of the same divine rendering.
And maybe that’s what this whole human experience is — not punishment or accident, but an immersive, beautifully designed lesson in remembering.
The Mirror Turns
There’s one more question that changes everything:Why would the greater reality be just like a computer?
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the other way around. Our computers are reflections of the greater reality.
Maybe our technologies — our code, our simulations, our virtual realities — are primitive reflections of something far more intricate and incomprehensible. When we build worlds inside worlds, perhaps we’re not inventing anything new. We’re just mimicking the architecture of creation — the same way a dream mimics waking life, or a child imitates a parent.
It’s possible that every new metaphor humanity invents — the loom, the clockwork universe, the simulation — is just a different lens for the same eternal mystery. Each era translates the ineffable into its own language of understanding.
As technology advances, our metaphors evolve. But what they point to never changes:
Reality is layered, conscious, and infinitely creative.
We probably will never fully comprehend the Source behind it all — but sometimes, if we listen closely, we can sense it humming through everything we build, everything we dream, and everything we are. It’s hard to see or even imagine the big picture from inside the Matrix.
If every dreamer eventually wakes, perhaps the universe itself is still stirring — preparing to open its eyes.
The Final Reflection
Perhaps the veil of forgetfulness isn’t a flaw in the system.Perhaps it’s the most brilliant feature — the one that makes rediscovery possible.
Because only by forgetting can we know the wonder of remembering.Only by dreaming can we awaken.And only by living inside the simulation can we realize that we are, and always have been, the ones who wrote the code.
Your Turn
Have you ever had an experience that felt like remembering something you’d forgotten your whole life?Share your story in the comments, or take a quiet moment today to ask yourself — what part of me is still asleep?
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