Dreaming is a necessary component of mind, and for many decades it has been known that in order to keep a sane mind, sleep and dreaming is required. But what if I told you that recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have shown that even neural network need some form of dreaming in order to be well trained?
But are we also dreaming in waking life? I have seen stuff while awake that really was not what I should have been seeing given where and when I was! In essence, the brain could well be isolated from the outside world, as it only receives electrical pulses and transmits them. It then builds its representation of reality based on those signals alone...
As for recent developments like ChatGPT the word dream is an interesting one too: if asked the right questions (or wrong questions), it tends to dream or fantasize as well, so I guess we still need to develop Artificial Intelligence further.