Whatever you can possibly notice – in your body, in your mind, in the World – has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience.

Now I am not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external World.

And the dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external World – and that is why you seem to be able to get away with everything.

But your mind is all you have. It is all you have ever had. And this might sound calloused to say when there are maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of being addressed … But it is still true. 

If you are perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it does not matter how much success you have or who is in your life, you are not going to enjoy any of it.

Even when we are ostensibly doing nothing – as during states of rest, sleep, and reverie – the brain continues to process information. In resting wakefulness, the mind generates thoughts, plans for the future, and imagines fictitious scenarios.

In sleep, when the demands of sensory input are reduced, our experience turns to the thoughts and images we call dreaming.

In both wakefulness and sleep, spontaneous experience combines recent and remote memory fragments into novel scenarios.

These conscious experiences may reflect the consolidation of recent memory into long-term storage, an adaptive process that functions to extract general knowledge about the world and adaptively respond to future events.

During our waking hours, we spend about half of our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings – daydreaming or mind-wandering.

Beyond this, we spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping. The activity of the brain, as well as our accompanying stream of Consciousness, persists throughout all these states of wakefulness and sleep.