Waking consciousness is positional through and through. Every intention refers back to an interlocking network of references in physical and psychic space which align to bring about the effect of a real subject in a real world. All of this exhausts the mind so that periodically it needs to surrender it all in order to renew itself, in dream sleep and in dreamless sleep. The body is temporarily paralysed when physical references are dissolved and in the same way the psychological self is loosened and anesthetised when its referential structures are reabsorbed into consciousness - they are made of nothing but consciousness and have no intrinsic being. It would be frightening to discover that consciousness could retain its vividness in their absence, but until this is realised the waking world, the sense of being a life, remains haunted by a subtle sense of inauthenticity, of being an imposture that veils a truth you feel unprepared to handle, but which always looms over you.