I'd now like to bring your attention to a very preceptive comment made by Philip K. Dick:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. … So I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.” Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.