What precisely defines what is "real" [reality] vs something that is "sub-reality" [like dreams]?

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I delved into this a lot about 5 years ago. I wanted to know if non-physical entities and realms could be real and exist. Looking back on it now I realize that these things are bigger than our minds are able to comprehend. At the time I decided that something was real (to you) if it stuck around after you stopped feeding your mental energy into it.

Everyone who meditates comes up with crazy ideas that seem so fucking real at the time. The next day you have to decide, was all that crap real or just an illusion?

The more spiritual I get, the more willing I am to just relinquish existence and reality to the materialists. They have their definition of reality and existence, and I have mine. Only, mine doesn’t really matter unless you’re deep in trance or whatever. Literally every other time, I’m simply agreeing with atheist materialists.

I’m satisfied relegating the spiritual to the realm of importance. It doesn’t have to be real, it doesn’t have to exist, in order to be important, and to mean something. You can dive deep into trance or dreaming or whatever and discover insights that would sound utterly ridiculous to materialists, and I will be your staunchest defender.

Where materialists go wrong isn’t in deciding what actually happens in this world, it’s in deciding what should matter to people. Stories matter. Myths matter. Someone’s intensely personal mystical experience matters, to them. If you ask me, is something matters to someone, then it’s real. A different kind of realness than materialists have in mind, but at that point it becomes a matter of semantics, not metaphysics.

And the thing about semantic conflicts is that you can resolve them by finding new words and phrasings to describe what you want to describe. Not even materialists can argue that the words of Shakespeare are meaningless, even if they’ll hold to their heart of hearts that the Bible is stupid. But what is the real difference here? Mere hundreds of years. Shakespeare was a playwright in his day, but he would have been on the committee writing the Bible if he was born in that day.