A Lamp, Switch, and Awareness

I knocked my little lamp by my bed off it's perch while it was still dark this morning.  So I reach down to the floor and proceeded to run my hands over its base, looking for the little switch.  I had a firm picture of the switch in my mind, and became puzzled because I didn't find it.  

And then I remembered that I just woke up, and as crazy as it might seem, that might mean that I was utterly and completely wrong about where the switch would be.  I found that completely different switch, that little rod like thingy that sticks out just below where the bulb is, clicked it on, and immediately remembered that this little lamp had always been that way.

Dreams can be deceptive.  I don't even remember having any sort of dream including the lamp, or the nature of its switch.  I know I had been dreaming just before, but there was nothing with enough emotional weight to lead to me to pay enough attention.  Attention, awareness- if I had had enough of it in the dream state, I would have awoken with story I could tell.

In a sense, I think whatever makes up dreams may be happening all the time, but we can only focus on certain things at certain times.  When I am awake, it's the realities of being human in this world.  Reality reinforces memory.

But if you find yourself having trouble going to sleep- especially if you think you are having too many repetitive thoughts- try seeing with your eyes closed.  Obviously, you can't see anything because your eyes are closed, but the mere act of trying to observe whatever may show up in your visual field tends to quiet your mind- and you will 'see' things- fragments of dreams.

It helps me get to sleep faster.  I think there is a similar situation in meditation wherein, having successfully disengaged from your usual thoughts, you start to become aware of all these other thoughts, many of which don't seem to have anything to do with you.  It's as if there's just an ocean of thoughts out there, and maybe none of them really come from us.  Maybe we just observe them, and make a mistake when we start to identify with them.  I would not, after all, condemn my lamp to switch re-assignment surgery.  

I wonder about the nature of awareness.  Obviously, we need to pay enough attention to reality in order to continue living and observing,  but it is the observing that seems interesting, assuming we have a wide enough net to catch the interesting things.