1. The title, "Mind Makes This World," is not the whole of the essay, nor is it to be taken metaphysically but phenomenologically.

2. Agreed, and I make this clear in my essay:

"For example, the difference between being awake and dreaming is not that you experience reality itself in the former while your mind makes stuff up in the latter, but that your mind constructs experience out of external sensory data in the former and from internal data in the latter. We distinguish the two in retrospect and anticipation, but both waking and dreaming experiences are equally 'real' in the moment, as far you’re concerned — they spring from the same neurocognitive source.

"Indeed, just about everyone knows what it’s like to be dreaming, only to begin hearing, say, a loud knocking that seems at once seamlessly integrated into the dream and yet somehow intrusive; only to awaken to the sound of someone knocking at their door. In deep sleep, we don’t dream at all; our sense of self disappears altogether. In shallow sleep, we dream. And in this aforementioned experience of waking from a dream, we know what it’s like to cross the threshold, not from non-experience to experience, but from experience constructed from internal data to experience constructed from external data."

The phenomenological point I make is that in the moment, both dreams and waking experiences tend to feel just as real as each other:

3. I certainly hope you don't feel required to read them. I simply suggest Metzinger's work to clarify what I'm suggesting in my relatively far shorter essay here.