Actually, it was Hinduism that first put forth the notion of an illusory reality. Their word for it is maya, the unreal world which our senses describe to us. Learning to see beyond maya to the true "non-reality" of the universe is essential to achieving nirvana.
In the third century B.C., the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou said he dreamed he was a butterfly, and upon waking could no longer be certain he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a man. This idea is more in the spirit of the movie Total Recall than any other, the concept that reality is only what we remember and perceive, and that it's impossible to "know" which perception is real if more than one exists.
The twentieth-century tweak on this is solipsism, but the idea itself is as old as philosophy and religion itself, in all its shapes and forms. Science fiction gives us the chance to explore this idea using technology instead of dreams and religion, but the idea is nothing new. There are no new stories.