Trying to make sense of a reality breaking experince

[Cleopatra]

I experience Hypnopompic hallucinations, they are basically hallucinations that occur as you are waking up in the morning and in a state that falls somewhere between dreaming, and being fully awake. Hypnopompia, (the state of consciousness leading out of sleep)  is a completely different state of consciousness from awareness and dream state.  It's not a disorder, its a known sleep related thing

The hallucinations do not cause fear because somehow, in that brain state I know that what i'm seeing is not real and will soon clear away. Usually I'll close my eyes and reopen or just wait with my eyes open for the hallucination to play out while my brain transitions to a more awake conscious state.
The things I see are benign and not really remarkable, like a swarm of bugs, my walls doing some kind of motion. One time, I saw this weird, elaborate non-geometric shape hovering above my head for like 3 nights in a row. The only time it ever caused fear was when I woke up and there was smoke in my room, I was calm for a while but my conscious mind snapped in and thought there was really smoke, so I ran to my kitchen to check the stove. There was no actual smoke. By the time I got back to my bed I was fully awake and the smoke hallucination cleared. 

Although I know when it's happening that those things are not actually there, they are still experienced by me as real things in my room.  I'm able to follow the things with my eyes when they move, especially when it's the flying bugs, so i always assumed that like real life, the thing i'm seeing is there ,and when I turn my face away it's still there. 

But a recent experience showed me how this assumption is completely false. One night in October, I feel asleep on the couch in the afternoon and  as I woke up, I started to see a little light show, like a roman candle just two feet away from me in the air at eye level (I was to looking in that direction when I work up). It grew a little bigger and the lights sort of danced around each other. Normal, totally normal for me. I was not really in a good mood so I just wanted it to be over soon so closed my eyes, and shifted my lying position from being on back to being on my left my side, and I opened my eyes, I fully expected that the light thing would not be on the side I turned to, I expected that it would remain on the spot I was looking towards before and I would have to turn my head back to that spot to see it again (like normal reality)  but NO, there it was in front of me. I closed my eyes and turned to another direction, the thing was facing exactly where I had turned my eyes to. I did it a few more times, same thing, it shows up where I open my eyes to.
In those moments I was experiencing my brain LITERALLY projecting a piece of reality (or non reality,  since it's a hallucination) through my eyes. Everywhere I turned my eyes, it would project the light thing there, like my eyes were a projector and the real film is playing in my brain. 

The hallucination finally cleared but I was left with this feeling of: what really is reality?  I got to experience my brain projecting something into my sort-of-waking reality as I shifted my gaze. How then do I know what the hell it's doing with my actual waking reality? I almost believe now that waking reality just a more refined version of this projection system, @Leo Gura I remember you saying something like this in one of your videos but I actually got to experience a real life demo.