It’s not that we actually have two distinct minds. Indeed, the mind cannot tell us what it is at all, though we exert every effort to compose sophisticated models and language about such matters. If the mind cannot declare to us its own nature and identities… how vastly more impoverished are words?

Am I my words? Through these symbols I make, can you know me? Something of my thoughts, intentions… purposes, perhaps.

So it is not as if we formally have a dreaming mind and a waking mind. But I will speak as if this is a useful perspective, for I think it is, even though actual matters are not amenable to mere descriptions.

The dreaming mind has many fascinating qualities. I have tried, over many years now, to gain insight into their nature and appearances. I have struggled to acquire some insight around what occurs when we sleep. And how it differs from my consciousness whilst awake.

The differences are profound and myriad.

But for the moment I will concern myself with two: identity and declaration.

For the waking mind, any object »is that object. Any being »is the one we name. Words become … not merely pointers (as they should be) but something more severe. We easily confuse them with complete knowledge of their referents. Of what they should point toward, inviting us to explore. Sometimes, they still do this, but by and large, we use words only when we have learned to ignore what they refer to. The word ‘sparrow’ tells us nothing of the bird, its people, its ways of life. Or any specific sparrow in a living situation. Yet we think, if we know the word, we know ‘what’ a sparrow is. Because we can say: organism, bird, sparrow.

The dreaming mind is not like this at all. It doesn’t care for words or names, and carefully avoids declarations… it avoids language altogether. We may remember exchanges of communication in dreams, and even ‘remember’ the exact ‘words’ and their sequences. But this is not (usually) what is happening in the experience of dreaming at all. In fact, if this begins to happen in a dream, that dream will soon give way to waking.

In a dream, a person is rarely »the person we later recall them as having been. Identity itself is ambiguated, purposefully, by the dreaming mind. So, too, what we may later remember as linguistic exchanges. Ever try to read in a dream? If you remember attempting this… what happened?

Language is unlike the dreaming mind’s way of being. This way does not merely value ambiguity, it thrives on it. Explicit identities, explicit roles and ‘declarations’ are not entirely missing from the dreaming manifold, but their otherwise deafening volume is vastly … and intelligently … creatively … reduced. And replaced with something else. Something we have few useful words for. Ambiguity doesn’t really capture it. It’s a kind of cognitive freedom.

Freedom from determination. Suspension. Floating.

And, perhaps… freedom…

From Knowledge itself.