If you inspect in your own experience what "Realness" is, the sense that something is real, it essentially boils down to how impactful it is on your ego. When I had my first psychedelic trip using LSD, I tripped alone and had a panic attack before the trip even started. Throughout the trip, I was holding onto sanity. I quickly noticed as the trip intensified that my thoughts became terrifying. Each thought I have appeared to influence my entire reality, they came "too real". The thoughts themselves became profoundly intense, the only real thing at the time. I was terrified of a horror trip, so to avoid ending up in a hospital I tried to trip-sit myself by writing words down on a paper that would prevent me from drifting into a negative state. Each word I wrote completely consumed me, it became reality itself.   Looking back at this experience, the question becomes, what exactly does it mean for something to become "more real", or "reality itself". It is very clear to me now that any sense of realness is something that is essentially illusiory. What realness actually is, what is "reality", simply means how influential an object of consciousness (any given experience, such as a thought, sense-impression and so forth) is to the ego. What is real essentially just means what is important to the ego, what influences it, what it focuses on, what consumes it. To understand this more deeply you can look at the nature of psychosis. The first time I heard it explained this way was by Dr K. Basically, Psychosis simply means that a mind takes it's thoughts to be real. What is the difference between a psychotic paranoia and a regular person? It's not actually the thoughts that fill the psychotic person. A regular person might walk across the street, and a thought might occur in their mind "What if this person wants to rob me?". The regulated person knows that this is just a thought, that there is a distinction between reality and that thought. They might not react to it at all, or get some anxiety, but eventually they realize "Well, I'm just being paranoid, it's just a thought.". To the psychotic person, the thought they have immediately becomes their reality. They do not recognize it as a thought, to the ego, it becomes total reality.  So essentially, psychosis is a spectrum: The more you believe your own thoughts to be real, the more psychotic you are. If you recognize the unrealness of all thoughts, you would be totally free of psychosis.   This is why ego death reveals that reality is an illusion, a dream. The word illusion in this sense is meaningless in and of itself, it simply means that the content of consciousness has no impact on the ego, because the ego no longer exists. It is as unreal as a dream, not because it loses it's Isness, but simply because it isn't important to the ego. A dream is an experience which holds no importance to the ego once it realizes it had no relevancy to it's survival. Dream just means "It's not relevant to my survival.". Redness doesn't stop to exist, or be any less real than it was before, it just means there is no ego to take it seriously, to prioritize it, to assert it to be part of itself. I invite you to truly inspect this idea of Reality, or "Realness". How does it make sense for something to be more or less real? And truly, if you inspect your sense of "realness", within your own experience, what is it truly? If you take psychedelics and have an impactful experience, it is no accident that the most real thing you will end up asserting to exist happens to also be the most meaningful thing that exists for the ego. Meaningfulness just means something drives the ego, something is essential to the function of the ego.  In this way, psychedelics induce psychosis in all those who consume it. If you end up with an ego at the end of that experience, you will have just amplified it's psychotic attachments to various thoughts and contents within itself. This is why psychotic people are indistinguishable from long term psychedelic users. If you trip, and you have the thought "I am an alien", that becomes your reality, your psychosis. And because consciousness can take on infinite forms, your ego can get psychotically attached to it in infinite ways.   Notice that essentially, the meaningfulness of an experience is equal to the realness of an experience. I could put an electrode in your brain, stimulate the neural network that is responsible for attributing a sense of meaning to an object of consciousness, and you would come out of that experience saying "This thing is more real than anything I have ever experienced!". That just means it's more important to your ego than anything you ever experienced. That's why you start shitting and crying, because it overstimulates your egoic structures. Isness itself doesn't have degrees of reality to it. Isness just is, every other assertion is just more evidence of your psychosis.