The line comes from the David After Dentist video, uploaded to YouTube in 2009, in which seven-year-old David DeVore Jr., still affected by anaesthesia after having wisdom teeth removed, talks to his father in the car on the way home. His repeated question about whether life was real quickly became one of the internet's earliest viral moments, shared, remixed and quoted for years. It endures because the dazed, sincere reaction still fits any moment that feels too strange to believe.