At the end of  Lewis Carroll’s 1871 children’s novel, “Through the Looking Glass,” Carroll’s heroine, Alice, asks her cat, Kitty, an important question about her recent escapade across a giant chessboard: “Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. …You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course — but then I was part of his dream, too! was it the Red King, Kitty?”  The idea that we are all living in a dream, known as the “simulation hypothesis,” dates back to ancient Chinese, Indian, Greek and Aztec philosophy, but received new life in 2003 when Nick Bostrom argued that we were all living in a giant computer simulation.  E. Hughes has built a career not only as a poet and science fiction author, but also as a philosopher of metaphysics.  Her new book “The Absence of Reality: Aphorisms and Observations on the Nature of Reality and Existence” explores this idea.  E. Hughes joined the Monday Buzz on December 22, 2025.

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