His explorations in search of orientation and synthesis were undertaken with waking mind and this entailed a functional bias against a dreaming mind which had its own effortless and quite different orientation and synthesis. If the quality of awareness and fluid thinking found on waking in the small hours was a clue then this reverse side of the day always kept the key anxieties in sight: death, isolation, insignificance and sceptical doubt. Although waking mind brought a soothing relief from these, a relief felt deep in the body as well as in the mind, its gifts came not from any certain knowledge but simply from having a job to do. Unanswerable questions needed to be put aside to get on with practical engagements with a daily reality that happened to be tolerably regular most of the time - a matter of sheer luck. The world with which waking mind would engage was all too happy to do his dreaming and desiring for him, and to define the shapes and limits of anxiety, as if its goal was to become a surrogate for dreams in eliciting and engaging a self. This world-given self was so much larger than the private one, and seemed anyway to have accommodated its needs with so much foresight that to swim against the current back towards the original self required passage through an almost impassable region of contraction and boredom.