Physiological Borders

Regardless of whether the characters in your dreams are like puppets, zombies, etc., or whether they are themselves conscious, ordinarily in your dreams—just as in your waking life—it is along the Fact of Exclusive Conjoinment Border (buttressed by the ASI Border) that boundaries between self and other get drawn. Forgetting one particular “point of view”—that of being at home lying in bed—is the negative component of the illusion; the FEC Border is the positive one. What is interesting about this is that within our dreams when we are experiencing the dream we automatically believe that we are in the presence of other persons and “behave” accordingly. Later, when we are awake, looking back upon the dream from the perspective of waking life, we do not tend to assume that, in the dream, we were in the presence of other persons. And we would tend to think this way regardless of whether the characters in our dreams are minded.