Is there any warrant to inquire into the workings of illusion? Clearly there is, even though the frame of such and inquiry will necessarily be destroyed as it proceeds - that you are willing to take the risk of ending the dream distinguishes this from a dream - a mere disposition isn't much but it is not nothing. If there were unbridgeable and entirely empty gaps in consciousness you would not know they were there. It is not like a cut in a movie which might be designed not to be noticed but which you can see if look out for it - you see it in that case because you can put it up against your own continuity of expectation, but if the cut were in your own consciousness you'd have no concurrent duration by which to reference it. On the other hand if there were no gaps, if there was unbroken continuity, then the rapid changes of state and context required for getting through life would impose an intolerable burden, rather than, as seems to be the case, merely producing a sort of deferred strain to be dealt with in the next period of deep sleep and dreams. In computer jargon we can say that while forgetting has its associated complexities, it is a far more simple and less resource-hungry process than remembering. There is thus no continuity but considerable effort goes into having it seem as though there is, as if you are always there behind the changing face of events, a sort of free transcendental self. Such a self is no more than a self-understanding as flexible and transparent, a effect beautifully achieved via invisible cuts which succeed precisely because the consciousness is irremediably anything but flexible and transparent.