In Dreams, Who Controls the Narrative?
A useful analogy for describing the nature of reality is that of a dream, where consciousness is the dreamer, and the body-mind perceiving an apparently external dream world is the dream character.
Questions may arise, then, about agency during the dreamed experience. If the dream character has no independent existence and therefore no free will of its own, and if consciousness seems to watch the dream unfold as an observer, is the dream narrative purely a spontaneous unfolding within consciousness? If so, what influences the narrative?
Since the dream character has no independent agency, it cannot make independent decisions, for its every action, thought, and experience is entirely a creation within the dreaming consciousness. (According to the nondual understanding, the reality of the dream mirrors the reality of the waking world. The apparently separate self, the individual body-mind, is an expression within consciousness; it is not separate from it. Therefore, the body-mind which appears in consciousness has no independent agency of its own, apart from the consciousness that knows it.)
While consciousness might seem to be a witnessing presence or an observer watching the dream unfold, it is more intimate than that. Consciousness is not a separate entity observing the dream; it is the dream—the light, the street, the house, the chair, the characters, all of it, all at once. The act of observing is consciousness witnessing its own creation. It is consciousness knowing itself, indirectly, through a particular point of view and in a particular setting.
Is the dream narrative a spontaneous unfolding? Yes, in the sense that consciousness does not consciously plan each detail like a human screenwriter devising a plot. There is an inherent spontaneity to the arising of forms within consciousness.
However, spontaneous here does not mean entirely random. The dream narrative is influenced by the accumulated impressions and tendencies residing within the localized mind of the dreamer, which is itself an activity within consciousness. These are the memories, desires, fears, experiences, and conditioning from the waking state that help direct the narrative of the dream. A mind steeped in fear may manifest nightmares. A mind filled with joy is likely to experience delight. These influences are not external impositions; they are qualities and patterns arising within the dreaming consciousness.
Dreaming is a natural part of the spontaneous play of consciousness, and most often there is an internal coherence, a dream logic, a loose structuring, that, while often peculiar, maintains a certain consistency within its own framework.
Extending this analogy to our waking reality, the “narrative” of the universe is similarly a spontaneous unfolding within consciousness. Our lives are not predetermined by an external deity, nor are we experiencing randomly generated chaos. The experience of life is an ever-present, unfolding reality, and proclivities and patterns within the activity of the mind at the relative level influence these expressions of consciousness.