A French philosopher came up with this answer to your question: I think, therefore I am. (Because we can think about the world, we do exist.)

No, we do not live two lives. Our minds create a complete--or incomplete--scenario when we dream. Dreaming is a way of dealing with what happened during the real, awake part of the day. We have fears, emotions, and desires, which come out in dreams.

You are precious, special and important because God made you that way, and nothing anyone can say or do can ever change that. And nothing you can say or do can change it. Saying nothing is real does not make it true. Proof you are real is that you ask such an important question.

  Forklifts exist.  Forklifts are very real.  Everything else derives its reality from that of forklifts.

I to have this feeling. It's weird. O.o

This question is absurd, there is no way to tell. It takes a powerful mind just to wrap yourself around this question and a dangerously powerful mind to solve it. In this day and age, none such exists and won't for an indefinate amount of time.
Millions of theories exist but these are still just theories, there is not a single grain of evidence to built reference on. Don't even trouble yourself, unless you are in prison, criminally insane, or retired, you don't have the time and/or resources to even ponder things of this magnitude.

This is an interesting question to many people, because often we don't challenge our common-sense ideas about reality.

Here's the short version: reality exists. That is to say "something is definitely happening", there isn't just nothingness (if there was nothingness, you would not be experiencing the reading of this statement).

The question that nags us is "well, what is reality?". The answer that's most available and obvious is "reality is your immediate experience." In other words, whatever experience you are having at this moment is the only thing you can be absolutely sure is real. Everything else is "second hand" knowledge of some sort, because its all based on concept, conditioning, and memory.

Descartes is famous for having asked this question aggressively, looking for some solid basis in which to ground his philosophy. What he came up with is "I think, therefore I am." This answer is now widely regarded as flawed, because the "I" part is quite doubtful actually.

In other words, its obvious that *thinking* is occuring, because that's something observable in each moment's experience. But the "I" in his statement just pops into existence without precedent: on what basis did Descartes conclude that he had a "self" which is doing the thinking?

So no, you cannot be sure that "we" are real in the usual naive sense of the word. "Self" is a concept, just like "cup" or "automobile". But you can be sure that there are a lot of thoughts and body sensations going on, and you can be sure that breathing is occurring, etc.

Hi !
We are all made up of atoms. we exist and we are real.I myself wonder about these 2 different existences.In a self help book called `the secret' they talk about the universe as a live being and its constantly on the move. when you think of the world like that, it makes you wonder how small are we in comparison to everything else that exists.

Reality... Okay, how's about this. Why care? I mean, do you belive you exist? Do you think you exist? Is the fact that you are "living life" not good enough for you to just accept whatever it is, even if it is not real? How do you tell and why should you care? Seriously, the question is inherently meaningless. If questions like these are asked, it gets us nowhere. You wrote it, so to me you're real, ven if this state isn't "reality" It's good enough for me to belive I'm alive and living. You'll just get a paranoid headache if you think all this matrix stuff. My advice, just wing it, live and try to do well for yourself. because as far as we know, these 70 or so years are all we have. Why waste them?

I read this before. "Any thing we remember exists only in our heads. Therefore is not real. The future exists only in our plans and therefore it is not real. Also there is a slight time lag from when we sense something and actually become intellctually aware of it. So any intellectually conceived object is not real. Reality is the moment before you sense the world. Well that is an atempt to explain when reality is but doesn't do any thing to explain what it is. Besides it's just a theroy and imposiible to prove. So it's pointless to think of such things. Still it can be fun.