Michael,

Consider the difference between being awake and dreaming is that when we are awake, our minds are constantly having to reset to new input. Like driving down the road and the mind flashes these quick images of what might have happened had that other car not swerved away, etc. Yet the consciousness quickly goes back to paying attention to the next.

Yet when we are dreaming, it doesn't have to reset. It just keeps following out these imaginations as they bounce around all the stuff stored in the brain.

Which is often what we do when we are just sitting there and thinking, our minds are just bouncing around all the things occuupying it and imagining how they might work out.

To which I would add the point I keep making about time, that it isn't so much the point of the present moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Energy is "conserved," because it is the present and its dynamics create time, so energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns it generates go future to past.

As consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions, thoughts go future to past.

So the consciousness acts as an energy, constantly seeking out the situational cracks and crevices to push through and the forms it has established to push on, going through cycles of expansion and consolidation, as we both experience and learn.

Our narrative experience is underlaid by those thermodynamic cycles.