In the Vedic philosophy, the material world is described as a dream. All of us have had the experience of a dream. While we are in the dream, everything that goes on, seems quite real. We move through the same register of emotions and impressions as when we are awake. In a dream we can experience misery or enjoyment the same way we do as when awake.
So anyone can testify to the fact that their dreams seem real enough. What, then, is it that makes a dream unreal? Because it ends. When we wake up, we know, oh, it was only a dream. So it is the element of time, that makes a dream unreal. If the dream continued, that would be our reality. But because it only lasts a few seconds, we know it is a dream. Real existence is continuous.
The funny thing is that life is exactly like that. Life is a dream in the sense that life has a beginning and an end. But because the 60, 80, or 100 years it lasts feel like a life-time, we say that life is real. But in a cosmic time scale of, say, billions of years, our life-span of 60-80 years are but a few fleeting seconds. Next to a demigod with a lifespan of millions of years, our life would be more or less unreal. Actually, what we experienced a week ago might as well have been a dream. The enjoyment I had a week ago, now, is no more real than had it been something I experienced in a dream.
So in terms of time, the idea that life is illusory like a dream begins to make sense. The crux is to understand the temporary in relation to the eternal. In contrast to eternal time our current temporary existence will always be fleeting and insubstantial; it will be a short flash - like a dream. Even a long dream like life comes to an end. Our perceived lifespan, however long, is such a miniscule glimpse in the vastness of eternity that it doesn’t even register. The same is true of the computer I am writing on. In terms of eternity it is illusory.
Even if I left it sitting alone on my desk and never touched it, in due course, it would be demolished by time. It would be broken down into atoms and cease to exist. However long that would take is immaterial. To us a thousand or a million years may seem like a substantial amount of time but from the point of view of, say, Lord Brahma, the first created living being in the universe (who lives for the unfathomable length of time of 311.04 trillion years) surely my computer, the desk my computer sits on, as well as the house that surrounds the desk, cannot be said to exist. Before Lord Brahma even has time to finish his morning ablutions we would have been born and died thousands of times.
That’s why our present existence in a body that changes from childhood to youth to old age, is unreal and dream-like. Our life in this particular body has a beginning and an end, and for that reason it is a dream. Our life is not unreal in the sense that it does not happen. Obviously it does. If I bash my head against a wall it will hurt, and that pain is real enough. So the unreal factor about the body is not that it doesn’t take place but that it ends.
That’s the real illusion of material life. One may consider his enjoyment in the material world very substantial. What’s wrong with enjoying? What’s wrong with seeking some happiness, one may ask? The answer is that the pleasure of life always ends. That’s what’s wrong. Such pleasure can never satisfy the self, because the self is eternal and therefore hungers for lasting pleasure. That's why no amount of bodily and mental gratification can satisfy the self.
