I’ve been thinking about how we perceive reality, and I wanted to share a perspective on why waking life might actually be a functional contraction of awareness, while sleep is its liberation. To understand this, it helps to distinctly separate three things: the Awareness, the Mind, and the Brain.

The immediate awareness during the awake state dissipates, yes, but as the brain relaxes, it loses its grip on awareness. Your mind is the intersection of awareness and the brain. The more your awareness is fused with and filtered through the brain, the more active the mind is in maintaining the structure of reality. When your mind almost completely shuts off during deep sleep, and you no longer perceive physical sensory input, you start to become aware of things that don't make sense. You become aware of radical paradigms, bizarre things, or even the experience of "nothing," which can't be easily comprehended during the awake state.

How can you become aware of nothing and paradoxical things in the awake state? You can't, because the brain restricts awareness in that state. In a dream state, not only can you still have an awareness of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touch, but you also expand into worldviews that the waking brain simply cannot compute. That's not awareness contracting; that's literally an expansion of awareness.

How can you become aware of nothing and paradoxical things in the awake state? You can't, because the brain restricts awareness in that state. In a dream state, not only can you still have an awareness of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touch, but you also expand into worldviews that the waking brain simply cannot compute. That's not awareness contracting; that's literally an expansion of awareness.

When you wake up, you are contracting your awareness. It creates an illusion because you have that strong sense of self from the mind, but that sense is just conception overlaid on perception.

Waking up is like plugging a massive hard drive that contains all the information into a small computer. Your awareness brings back huge insights from the "larger" source, but because the brain doesn't produce the "information" naturally, it creates a state of dissonance. To cope, the mind constructs reality for you by making distinctions, labeling, categorizing, and building structure to maintain itself. Reality is constructed to "appear" consistent so we can navigate life efficiently. It loses its grip on the expansive information, and the memory fades as awareness is fused back with the brain to be filtered again.

A lot of people come from a materialist or scientific paradigm, which assumes the brain produces this consciousness. But there's no proof of that; we only detect neural activity, which are just the correlates of consciousness. It’s an epistemic assumption to say the neuron "creates" the experience or the bizarre dreams.

A more flexible and comprehensive paradigm—one that actually accommodates the expansion of sleep—is that the brain is a transceiver. It receives, processes, and filters consciousness. This has been suggested by researchers for a long time:

If you assume reality is entirely material, it’s hard to think otherwise. But consciousness can adapt to any paradigm. It's just awareness of paradigms. The question is whether your small computer, or the mind, can withstand that large stream of consciousness? The more you're able to withstand it, the more you get used to it, adapt, and build a more flexible internal structure based on that awareness.

Because the system works as a hierarchy—where the brain adapts to the mind, and the mind adapts to the awareness—you can actually observe this mechanism in real-time.

When you turn inwards, you start to realize the paradoxical nature of your conception mixed with perception. You start to see the loopholes in your awake mind. You become aware of how your mind is actively constructing reality. By turning inwards and focusing really on just the conception, the mind initially feels threatened. It feels threatened because it knows its perception of reality doesn't really hold itself independently. It knows that the perception of reality is caused by the contraction or filtration of awareness through the brain.

But if you're able to withhold that fear and remain open to exploring it, the mind will rebuild to adapt to that awareness, resulting in much more flexible paradigms. This is a process that can happen indefinitely, because the mind can expand indefinitely.

The mind is like clay. It can be shaped, molded, and rebuilt again into a better shape, as long as it doesn't expose itself to high-heat fire (extreme close-mindedness), which makes it rigid and brittle.

However, it's important to understand that this is a gradual process. You don't want to jump straight in, "opening your mind" too much all at once. If you lose that internal structure entirely, it will make it incredibly hard for you to integrate with society and navigate the awake state. It is a balance.