I know what a dream at night feels like. Why is it that life doesn’t feel like a dream?

To compare life to a dream, which the sages do, is simply an applicable metaphor for understanding the point of ajata.

Whether you are dreaming at night (which you take to be real) or are “awake” in this daytime illusion (which you take to be real), neither condition has anymore reality than the other: it’s illusion at night and illusion all day. This 24-hour dream is what I call the Dream with a capital D.

This Dream begins and ends, as all unreal things do, in impermanency. This is a clue as to its unreality. What is ultimately true cannot be some thing which comes and goes.

When you “awaken” to the Dream, while yet within it, you simply no longer take the Dream to have significance or meaning: you recognize what is empty as being empty.

Since the body, like all things, is impermanent, there will come a moment when the entire Dream too comes to an end: the universe, being a part of the Dream, disappears; there is only emptiness, which is all there ever was.

In fact, consider how unreal the universe is within the Dream. Though we cannot see the entirety of what we are naming, nor can we even comprehensively imagine it in its entirety, we have presumed to give it its name as if it were a finite entity.