Zoth Thanks for the welcome.

I don't believe that the personality is at all stable. In fact, the self is itself hardly one entity, but an integration of many different behavioral tendencies (where behavioral includes mental-behavioral phenomena such as thought) influenced by neurological, environmental, genetic factors (as well as their subjective counterparts).

Because every single event modifies the physical-subjective system that can be called the "brain-mind", then that means you yourself are constantly evolving. It's not that that alcohol acts on a stable entity to modify it, but that there is no stable entity; there is only a process. The changes are not temporary because change is not reversible; things flow in one directions. Every single experience modifies the neural structure, synaptic strength, subjective memory (and its physiological correlate), thus the system which we call ourselves is always changing.

Martakartus

I don't mean that there are two separate entities, though I did speak using that dichotomy for simplicity's sake. Instead I meant that there is a set of tendencies, experiences, memories, and constraints (what we can and cannot control. I.e., we believe we are our mind because we can change our thoughts, but we are not the chair in front of us because we can immediately affect it; it is outside our locus of control; we can only affect it by first affecting our thoughts, which can be considered the immediately manipulable objects of awareness)that define who we are; that form our identity. So our identity is not an entity, but an integration of many many factors. Every state of consciousness gives us more or less access to various parts, thereby causing changes in the self. I have personally found the contrast between the self I am conscious of in the dream state and the self in the waking state very distinct.


I don't think it'd be pointless for the dream self to carry out waking self's tasks because that's exactly what we are attempting to do with lucid dreaming. Or rather, we are attempting to merge the two in order to have "our personal" (i.e. waking) self's goals fulfilled. Keep in mind I put that phrase in quotations because identification itself is a psychological phenomena, and during waking life, identification is with the waking self, during dream life, identification is with the dream self. If we learn to question that identification which is but a "type" of thought, we learn to question the self, itself. And this teaches us to "transcend" or go beyond the identity and in so doing, we are able to traverse between the two. This is why I proposed that specific reality checking technique. Lucid dreaming can teach us to find the transience, malleability, and vulnerability of the waking self as well. Most people wake up after dreaming and call that dream unreal. That's a relative opinion, though, because if the dream self could be asked about the waking self, "they" would say the same thing.