Suppose that reality actually consists of more dimensions than just the three (four, counting time) that our minds are structured to experience. If so, then the world is, in fact, totally different than it appears to us since we are only perceiving a fraction of a multi-dimensional reality.
In the novel Flatland, written in 1884, Edwin Abbott explored what a two dimensional world would look like to its inhabitants and what three dimensional objects would look like if they invaded a two dimensional world.
The novel helps stretch our imaginations and became a classic. Now it's being made into a movie, the trailer for which can be viewed here.Woody Allen depicted something similar in Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character (Jeff Daniels) in the two dimensional world of a film on the movie screen suddenly steps out of the screen and into the three dimensional world of a woman (Mia Farrow) viewing the movie all alone in the theater.
Maybe our existence is like that of the characters on the screen. We think that what we perceive is all there is, while all around us there is a wider world of additional dimensions in which people live, and move, and have their being, and we're totally unaware of it because our minds are unable to apprehend those dimensions.
Perhaps at death we, like Jeff Daniels in the Purple Rose of Cairo, step off the three dimensional screen of this world and into a multidimensional reality that we could no more imagine before we experienced it than a child in the womb could imagine the world that it would be entering when it's born.
Perhaps we are surrounded by, and embedded in, a reality which is so much richer than that which we can experience, but we are totally oblivious to it until we take on a "body" with the senses to perceive it.
As Hamlet says to his companion: "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps so.
RLC