It's funny, my dad is somewhat of a "crackpot"(I am actually glad to be raised by one)... from my youth he always talked about how he has had experiences which lead him to believe he is not fully awake and speculates about how everyone else is not fully awake. I don't take it entirely seriously, but as I've heard it over and over again I've done a lot of thinking on the hypothesis... but no gathering of research so it's probably of no use yet, but good to be reminded about it.

The other thing I want to say, is that I am an extremely gullible person in my natural state. Even though I've been reading this blog for a bit over a year and trying to understand how one applies probability to life, this has been one of the more useful entries. The idea of calculating priors makes much more sense to me- and I think my failure to consistently do so is why I have been so gullible! Post-prior calculation, I seem to be a pretty decent reasoner (like you are in dreams, haha). So I just want to say thanks for bringing this up, it really helped me understand, and will help me explain to other people. I also hope that a lot more posts are done on helping calculate priors.