What is the definition of reality? Most people act as if it has something to do with a fundamental underlying permanence that is there whether or not humans are around.
Another definition, and one that I prefer, is that reality is that which we have evidence for. If we test something over and over, and it behaves the same way each time, we call it reality. If we have other ways of testing things beyond what we can directly perceive, and they behave the same way, over and over, we call that reality, too.
We call dreaming reality, since we have correlated certain kinds of brainwaves to what people say is dreaming. However we do not think that all of our thoughts (including dreams) are reality, since we often think of things for which there is no evidence.
If there is a thing for which there is no evidence, but you can get a sufficient number of people to say it exists, a lot of people are willing to call that reality, despite the lack of reproducible evidence. Personally, I don’t include such ideas in my understanding of reality.
We could call things for which there is reproducible evidence any other word we want. We don’t have to call it reality. We could call it a dream, but the underlying definition remains the same, no matter what we call it. Reality and dream are just words. Reproducible evidence is the best way of understanding, and, more importantly, predicting the future behavior of our environment.