Vanilla Sky is basically the story of severing your most strongly-held emotional attachments in order to do a painful but necessary thing, not by being strong and powering through a brutal process, but by gradually improving your vision to the point where, instead of seeing your loved ones, you see through them. Whether your loved ones are computer generated facsimiles or dream elements or something else is knowably unknowable, but that they’re beings just like you in the same reality as you is knowably false — that’s what nonduality means. 

Whatever they are, they do not exist in reality as they exist in your heart. They’re not what they appear to be, meaning that when unplugged from your emotional life-support system, they power-down like animatronic dolls. That might not make it easy to cut them loose and leave them behind, but it makes it doable. No one is so gung-ho that they want to abandon their loved ones and jump off a building, but by small steps we come to realize that it’s really for the best.