Part of the background of experience is the sense of your current state of mind and yet there is no clear sense of what a state is or what the boundary is between you and your own state. Once you are aware of the existence and variability of states then a lot of your time is spend in plotting changes of state, yet this only makes sense if the experiencer is distinct from the state and somehow constant across them, and if there is some sort of intuitive map of possible states. Knowing you are here is often precisely not knowing how to be there, as if the meaning of here and there were self-evident in the predicament. Again, you, here and now, certainly differ from the self of another in a different way than you differ from yourself otherwise, but your map of states is populated by others, by other instances of the same kind of being, immediately recognised. If what you are is the same whether, say, you are asleep or awake, dreaming or alert to the world around you, then where in the waking state is the compass-bearing that points to this peculiar identity? It takes only a moment to check in, but the result can be quite misleading. You even do it in dreams, assuring yourself that you are awake within the unfolding story but without the rigour that would expel you into lucidity.