Ah, yes Dreamer's Paradise [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine], that crossover point between existentialism and ethical philosophy.
To those naysayers, who'd rather avoid living a lie[footnote]This is not, by the way, to say you are wrong, but just to get you thinking. Historically, preference for a mediocre reality (or even a fell one) over a pleasant fiction is the majority opinion. Note in the top link (of my post), the dream machine is a narrative device used to dissuade against hedonism, on the presumption that we all would rather be waking than dreaming.[/footnote] I ask you the following:
First off, How do you know you're not living a lie already? Part of the problem is defining what is real, in relation to what is a dream.
~ As there is (to date) no peer-reviewed evidence of a human soul, or any mechanism by which one's identity continues on after death. Belief in any dogma that indicates an afterlife, whether Heaven and Hell, ascention to a higher order of being or reincarnation as someone / something else, is in fact suggesting that this world is the dream. It's the only feasable way that a person would be detached from one existential state and reattached in another (or, in the case of ascention, woken up).[footnote]The Gnostics [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostics] were not only certain of this being a dreamstate, but also that it was a nightmare to be escaped, with the biblical god as the dreammaster and the keeper of the gateway to wakefulness, and reality.[/footnote]
~ These meat-walkers that we pilot in our everyday existence give us an excrutiatingly limited perception of the reality around us, not unlike living in a diving helmet [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_helmet]. Sure, we don't notice our dulled senses as they're the only thing we've ever known. Our experience seems complete only because we've lived with our blind spots for so long. But also, there's a crapload of unconscious processing between what we percieve and what we experience, necessary since our brain isn't made to take in everything we see, so it seeks out critical elements and extrapolates the rest from there. This is why you can't see the car keys right in front of your nose, but you can see the guy next to you is your teenaged son by the back of his head, and you automatically read the Daft Punk lettering on his t-shirt before you even recognize they're Roman characters.
~ String theory posits that this universe, in its incomprehensibly vast glory (It's about as imaginable in hugeness as cosmic inflation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number]. The place that is The Bulk is reality, and not only is this a dream, but we are but figments of thought within that dream.
~ Then there's a the matter of time, and the delicateness of this film on a planet's surface between rock and space that we call reality. It is, in truth, as ephemeral as a dream and might count as one just because of the quacking and waddling[footnote]...to blend metaphors into a nice frothy metaphor smoothie.[/footnote]. All of our great works, the conquest of our Earth's surface, our immense body of knowledge, the fundamentals of truth as catalogued by Pythagoras, Euclid, Newton, Copernicus and so on, will all be forgotten with the flash of our Sun, and probably before that with an accidental collision of an asteroid, all but the blink of an eye in the life of the galaxy, much less a universe of countless galaxies. When all is gone and done, the legacy of those that built and accomplished will be as significant as those that dreamt of building and accomplishing. We are all, ultimately, Sisyphus [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus] pushing his rock out of sheer pride. Some of us enjoy merely dreaming of the rock, and creative ways of mobilizing it.
Second off, Are you sure you don't want to be living a dream? After all, it sounds better to be in a true world, but the dream serves a lot of purposes.
~ Consider all the fiction in which we indulge, whether literature, theater, cinema, television or games. These are all analogues for reality which are, themselves fantasies, ergo simply lower-tech versions of the dream.
~ As above, indulgence in any idea of an afterlife requires that the day-to-day reality we experience is a dream, itself. To accept that this is the real world is also to give up on immortality. (And, unless some kind of scientific miracle saves us, even an indefinite lifespan is out of our grasp; we are all doomed.)
~ Work done in dreams is not useless, as illustrated in Christopher Nolan's Jane McGonigal [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception] is of the theory that games can be used as a tool to develop solutions for real-world problems, and has created some notable examples.
Thirdly, can you handle the truth?
Sadly, we actually overindulge in dream fictions automatically, especially when it comes to political issues. Humans are prone to attitude polarization [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_polarization] in which we discount facts that are contrary to our belief systems in favor of facts that reenforce them, ergo, for example, violent-games alarmists instinctively indulge the dream that violent games really do inspire children to become more violent in reality. And these people dismiss published data that indicates otherwise, and take seriously data that agrees with their belief, even if the former data is more plentiful and comes from more reliable sources. I think the world would be a better place if we were able to discern trustworthy scientific data from contrived disinformation, and if the former were used to guide policy and the latter ridiculed. Alas, such a world is merely a fanciful...well, you get the idea.
Food for thought.
238U.
So in short, no, no I wouldn't.
