The "highest" entails gradations...a continuum. Why would the apex of the continuum be "real" but not its constituent parts? You seem to be thinking of Plato's Ideal Forms, but recall that Aristotle, almost immediately, demolish that theory. Furthermore, in his own Cave Analogy, Plato demonstrated that whatever is immediately available to our five senses, given our psychological orientation, is as "real" as it can get for us. Attempting to go beyond that, assuming there is even anything beyond, is an exercise in futility
I think that's just typically what people actually mean by the words. For example, most people do not consider santa claus real because an idea of him is contained within human brains, or minecraft characters real, because they exist in computer code.
I suppose if you were to grant that all constituent parts were "real", then essentially everything would be real. Gray aliens abductions, santa claus, the easter bunny, jesus, everything that exists inside any computer or book, or any human brain.
Such a view would be reasonably difficult to practically deal with however, accepting everything as equally true. The events in minecraft or a literary text would have equal weighting with whether you achieve your dreams. Nothing would really matter, more than any other thing.
Humans being output orientated machines, I think we'd struggle to think that way.
I guess we tend to think in this sense of higher orders, because its there that the final consequences rest. If we exist, for example in a computer program, ala the matrix, or even nirvana in buddhism, then only the output of that program reaches the reality above us - thusly our lives are of limited consequence, rather what would matter more is the events in that reality.
We think of our current plane of reality as "important", because we regard it as "the highest order". If it was, for example a virtual reality video game played by bored space aliens, it might have less existential punch.
I've never been a fan of plato's realm of ideal forms. That probably more resembles "everything being real equally" IMO, such as santa claus being real because he exists as an idea, equal to me being real, because I exist as a human body - his notion of concepts existing independently of their physical manifestation, I could never buy.
The shadows on the wall of the cave however, and some of his thinking about society - pretty inspired, although no more so than less known philosophers like Husserl, or older philosophers like the writers of mystic books like the Egyptian book of the dead. For our greek past I suppose, all those greek thinkers are held up on a pedestal - their thinking and their biases affected us a lot I think.
Husserl is interesting on the topic. He showed that everything we get via the senses, is subjective, interpreted, and secondary, and therefor the subjective is as objective as it gets. That there is no objective reality. Which is hard to deny, but tricky for some subjects to really square, such as the empiricism of science, which factors out the humans looking at the instruments and interpreting them.
In a similar way Hume questioned reality. As a religious person, he saw reality as a projection of the mind of god, that when we left the room, it ceased to exist. That kind of radical scepticism (is anything real), that one finds in philosophy that even sharp logical thinkers will throw out of the question, because its simply too complicated and hard to know to consider.
Of course, yes, we could regard everything as real rather than question anything, ala I think therefor I am, anything that exists, exists in some form at the explicit layer, but that has its own problems as I discussed above - then santa claus and the monsters that live under a childs bed are as real as the mac truck that's hurtling towards you.
And the common assumption that what is physically manifest, is "the highest order" is one made for convenience, I think for the most part. If there was a higher layer, and we could discover it, evidence it, it would undoubtable change our whole perception of reality, and the meaning of our existence.
In some ways, attempting to go beyond that, is a project of physics. They still are trying to find what composes matter, the forces, what drives the universe, and how it started - which is inevitably like asking "what else is there", or "what is the higher order of reality". It's hard to say, whether trying to achieve that either through evidence, or logic, or even introspection is an exercise in futility, without knowing the final outcome of those investigations, personally.
Failing, personally to answer those questions, does not mean there are no meaningful answers, any more than failing to build a flying machine means that one cannot fly. It could mean that, or could mean you went the wrong way about it, or didn't have the right information or tools.
I wouldn't regard myself even philosophy a complete failure on the quest - they have ruled some things out, and created some potential options, even if they haven't arrived via pure reason at the answer. Someone like augustine, even though he eventually tried to dismiss the problem, discovered why both god, and a big bang are not real explainations for why anything exists - because creation requires and event, an event is time based, and if time existed prior to anything, you are still left explaining. It's a mind bender of a problem, much like consciousness, and far too much of a topic diversion, but it shows that pure thinking can be productive, even if not delivering final answers.
In those instances I would take an object, say a leaf, from my immediate surroundings and examine it carefully, at a granular level, for visual and tactile distinctness; then, coupled with clarity of antecedents, how I came to be in that particular location, I would be able to tell whether or not I was dreaming. The underlying principle can be adjusted to detect the degree of "realness" in other situations
Like to perhaps remember how you came to be alive in the first place for example.
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