https://link.medium.com/Yu9F0VJpLBb

I re-posted this aphorism on my facebook wall on November 16, 2016. It’s a condensation of an array of astonishing features of dreams and dreaming that I have experienced and long reflected upon. The fact that we dream at all is staggering — as is the experience of it; but it’s rather common in our time to explain this away or pretend the waking mind has some kind of handle on what all that’s about.

Speaking generally, it doesn’t (i.e: we do not understand dreaming at all; in part because to do so we would have to deeply understand the essence of both consciousness and awareness — and possibly birth and death, too), even though the waking mind participates in aspects of its dreaming twin all the time — in fact, the waking mind can be understood as a structured way of constraining the faculties of the dreaming mind, and sustaining the results across the gap of sleep.