Book excerpt: If life is but a dream, to what do we awake? The central premise of Dreamstate: A Conspiracy Theory, is the admittedly ridiculous but incontrovertibly true assertion that the universe does not exist. This is something you can understand conceptually, like watching a documentary about Antarctica, or experientially, like moving to Antarctica. There’s also a related phenomenon where you fall asleep watching the documentary and wake up in the frozen wasteland. That’s gotta be weird, but the truth is that you’re asleep in a barren wasteland dreaming that you’re not, so that’s where waking up gets you.