Look into an old religion called Gnosticism. Their beliefs were based around a being called the Demiurge, which is a kind of false god thing at a far higher degree of consciousness than our own. Apparently it created the physical world and trapped us all here to farm us for our negative emotions. It's far more complex than that, but that's the basic gist that's relevant to this thread. Now, as I said, it's an old religion (pre-Christian). Obviously most religions are based on faith, and don't have any direct tangible evidence. There is some evidence that this is the truth.

There was a guy called Robert Monroe, who started a scientific institute called The Monroe Institute (which still exists today). He started the institute to study consciousness and the idea of it not being physical after he started having spontaneous astral projections in the 50s while he was testing out sleep learning with audio tapes. He's written a few books about it. An example of one of the scientific tests they did is this one where they had two people in isolation booths, one of them had a message that the other didn't know, they both projected, the first one told the second one the message astrally, then when they both woke up the second person knew the message. Robert Monroe was the kind of person who viewed this stuff as objectively as he could. He didn't have the bias of religion or materialist atheism or anything like that. They would just try things and report on exactly what they experienced, rather than interpreting it. So there were many, many things they discovered. The CIA actually developed their remote viewing program from Project Stargate based on The Monroe Institute's research. So the relevance to Gnosticism comes from a particular experience Robert Monroe had. Skipping the irrelevant and complex details (if you want to know more, he wrote a book called Far Journeys which details this particular experience), during a particular astral projection, he interacted with what seemed to be some kind of external conscious entity, and this external conscious entity taught him about this being that had created the physical plane and all of the laws of physics and such, and it was keeping us here to farm 'energy' (he called this 'energy' "loosh") from us when we had negative experiences. These negative experiences were meant to be inherent to the idea of existing within this reality and these physical laws. Now, this experience was coming from a guy who admitted to never having studied any kind of ancient religions or Eastern philosophy or anything like that. He had no idea what Gnosticism was, and yet he somehow came to the exact same conclusion about why we're all here in a very specific way.

Another slightly more circumstantial piece of evidence is this: every time Gnosticism has popped up throughout history, all followers are very quickly eliminated and the movement dies out. One example of this is the Cathars, who were a Gnostic sect in France in the 1400s. They're an interesting group to read about. I remember watching a David Icke video that explained it quite well. Miguel Serrano is another good source, although I think I remember him being a big Hitler supporter, and obviously an idea that floats around this board frequently is that Hitler was a Rothschild puppet (which is probably true considering they needed an excuse to create Israel (not to mention, YHWH is the demiurge and Moses fucked the world through the Mosaic Covenant, so, you know)), so some of his information might come from an Esoteric Hiterlist standpoint.

The specific relevance to this thread is that it's probably what Q was referring to with that Matrix analogy. Either that or Q was referring to adrenochrome harvest (another riveting topic), or something I'm not aware of. Either way, it's the one belief system (including atheism) that seems to have any actual tangible evidence to back it up, rather than just being based on faith and dogma, so I think people in this thread might find it interesting. That's not to say the Gnostics were necessarily right about everything of course. Just, they seem to be the most likely to be correct in this particular case out of all propositions. I would also recommend you all read the >>>/fringe/ recommended reading list.