Reality is effected by our beliefs. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, our viewing/measuring of a situation effects it.
Whatever we discuss on Noble Realms I always test against my own DIRECT EXPERIENCE. For example, that's why I cannot say whether many of the statements about alien intervention are "reality". My experience with entities from other realms is different from what many here have experienced. That doesn't mean I dismiss the experiences of others here. I just keep an open mind.
However, I can understand how Jen's friend would have this reaction because there IS a great danger for self-delusion here. (I think we all can fall into this, for example, on the thread about Soul Mates and Twin Souls.....we are discussing ideas about things we cannot prove or disprove. Most of us will probably not know what is the "truth" about the twin soul debate unless we either experience it directly or perhaps get access to the answer upon leaving this body. So we can exchange on that forum and imagine any explanation, none of which might be Real at all.)
I have my own experiences with non-human, non-physical entities, and the REALITY of this is not a question to me. The experiences are too numerous, too uncanny, and cannot possibly be explained away by other means. (I went through 17 years of traditional, left-brained, analytical education which programmed me to believe that anything outside the "rational, reasonable paradigm" of modern intellectuals was to be dismissed. Yet even such mental weaponry has left me unable to fight the paradigm shift these experiences required.)
I also had the wonderful benefit of meeting a teacher from traditional aboriginal society who could help explain and help me understand these experiences. This helped me to check my experiences against "reality", to understand which of my insights were legit and which were schizophrenic confusion.
However, I recognize that for people who have not had such experiences, it is impossible to prove this reality. That's fine with me. A decade ago I wouldn't have believed it either.
It is difficult for any human to figure out "reality" because if one tries to do so through mind it is completely impossible. Fleeting, limited.
However, I can experience the Reality of one-love/ all-one/ the connectedness of "all that is" and this experience is beyond mind.
Reality is always dual. There is the "reality" of my physical body that, if you were in this room with me, you could feel and see etc. But then there is the underlying Reality of who I am which is beyond this body.....and from that perspective, this body is not real, just my eternal soul.
In Yoga philosophy, the only things that are real are things that do not change. Anything that changes is considered unreal, illusory. So a physical world, constantly in flux, is not real. Only the consciousness behind it, the consciousness which structures and animates such a world, is real.
We create the forms our "reality" takes. We structure our own reality. Ancient Aztecs agreed that it was reasonable to sacrifice a human every year to the gods. They recognized that the true nature of a being was the soul, not the body, and death was just a change of form. It was an honor to be sacrificed. That was their reality.
Nowadays, if you tried to tell someone that you were really psyched cause you were gonna be the human sacrifice for your town for the year, they would say you'd lost touch with reality.
So it's important that we strucutre our beliefs to create the positive, beneficial reality that helps us evolve and grow and have an enriching experience here as little humans on earth.
: reality for humans is as conditioning is to lab rats... that is of course, unless one doesn't believe "the cage" exists in the first place. Some believe reality is a product of Creationism, yet others will ask "... so then, who made God?" Some believe reality is the product of evolutionism, yet again, others will ask ".... so then, how did evolution begin?" 
