You know, that's weird you say that, Nick.
When I was a kid I used to have this weird fantasy in which I'd imagine that I was on a metal table and lots of doctors and nurses were around me. My body was older (17 years old, don't know how I "knew" this). Everyone was looking at me expectantly. I knew that a girl standing by me was my girlfriend and one of my parents (not my real parent) was there.
"How was it?" my girlfriend asked.
I sat there, confused, and then realized the whole life as a child I had experienced was not real. It was generated by a machine. A great terror and sadness filled me, because all the things I loved so dearly was nothing. None of it was real. None of my feelings were valid. It was pretty horrific.
I'd typically shake it off and think, wow, I am glad that is just a daydream. But every once in a while I'd think, "but what if ..." and then I'd get all depressed.
Years later when I was taking the Practitioner training at NLP Comprehensive, there was this guy who studied under a guru in India. He had this neat trick where he could bring you into a special state of awareness where you really had the experience that everything was just awareness. The wierd thing about it was you could tell who he'd done it with and who he hadn't because when you'd look into their eyes you could literally feel their awareness with yours ... you could feel it was the same awareness. The people he didn't do it with, in general, just felt shut off ...
I thought about this and what he said for a while. He said that everything aside from pure awareness is illusion, garbage .... Well, I was back in the experimentation chamber again, and I felt it all closing in. I started to freak out a little and went to talk to him. He told me my ego was imploding. A matter of factly, like there was nothing to be done and I just had to deal with it.
Well, I dealt with it. I figured that the awareness was real as a level of consciousness, and the perceptions from there were valid. And since this world of "illusion" sprang from it, this too must have a place and a purpose and value ... and this level is real as a level of consciousness, too. One doesn't necessarily have to obliterate the other. It may be seen as a compliment or flowering.
Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Why foresake the fruit of the tree for the root?