I have come to believe, the question is not if we are dreaming, it’s what.
Some types of dreams we enter by falling asleep, other types of dreams we enter, by waking up.
How did I get here? By falling asleep? Or by waking up?
That’s seldom an easy question to answer, if I’m being honest with myself 
I’ve visited countless worlds and met so many people in my dreams. For me those were true experiences and I cherish them equally with my waking self experience. They had purpose and meaning and shaped me like a waking experience does.
And yes, waking up feels like falling into a narrowing mode of awareness in comparison to my dream self. Falling asleep on the other hand feels like releasing myself from that limited shell of experience. So much more can be achieved in that state.
agreed, while I have grown quite fond of the ‘training wheels’ my finite body provides, it sure can feel clunky and tiering at times 
Just like there are different types of sleep, I think there are different types of wakefulness, and I believe wakefulness in itself, regardless of within what realm, is a kind of dream come true.
I asked ai to tell me what it could about the word ‘dream’
it has a somewhat interesting history if the feed is accurate 
The Shifting Sands of “Dream”: From Joyful Noise to Nocturnal Visions
The word “dream,” a staple of our vocabulary for the subconscious wanderings of sleep, has a surprisingly vibrant and misleading etymological history. It didn’t always refer to the images and stories that unfold in our minds at night. In fact, its earliest incarnation in Old English, drēam, meant “joy,” “mirth,” “noisy merriment,” and even “music.”
This stark contrast between its ancient and modern meanings reveals a fascinating linguistic journey. The word we use today for nocturnal visions is believed to have been heavily influenced by the Old Norse word draumr, which did refer to what we now call a dream. Through the significant contact between Old English and Old Norse speakers, particularly in the Danelaw region of England, draumr is thought to have gradually supplanted the original meaning of drēam.
The Proto-Germanic root of both words is reconstructed as *draumaz. It is from this common ancestor that we see related words across Germanic languages, such as the German Traum, Dutch droom, and Swedish dröm, all meaning “dream.”
Interestingly, the native Old English word for a sleeping vision was swefn, which is related to the words for “sleep” in other Indo-European languages (compare with the Latin somnus). However, swefn gradually fell out of common usage and was replaced by the newly adopted sense of dream.
So, when we speak of our dreams today, we are using a word that once echoed with the sounds of celebration and music, a testament to the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of language. The silent, personal theater of our minds is now described by a term that once signified the most outward and audible expressions of happiness.