Are characters in a dream conscious?

[AshvinP]

Me and you as alters of Mind at large are conscious. Me and other dreamed up characters at night are alters of an alter's mind?
And by this all of the dreamed up characters have their own point of view and their own subjective experience?

That's a great question, a very deep one. Our dreams are much more than a materialist imagines them to be, that's for sure. Our ego/I is transported to a different realm of conscious awareness and I am confident there are other sentient beings participating in that process, but I am not 'initiated' enough to discern what exactly is going on. I have often thought characters in dreams may be representations of distinct sub-personalities within us which we are otherwise refusing to dialogue with while we are awake. That's just my pure speculation, though. I think it takes a lot of effort and time to figure out what's really going on in one's dreams, and no one dream can be isolated in meaning from the broader context of dreams throughout one's life, which is why it's so important to log the dreams as much as possible.

[Soul_of_Shu]

That's a great question, a very deep one. Our dreams are much more than a materialist imagines them to be, that's for sure. Our ego/I is transported to a different realm of conscious awareness and I am confident there are other sentient beings participating in that process, but I am not 'initiated' enough to discern what exactly is going on. I have often thought characters in dreams may be representations of distinct sub-personalities within us which we are otherwise refusing to dialogue with while we are awake. That's just my pure speculation, though. I think it takes a lot of effort and time to figure out what's really going on in one's dreams, and no one dream can be isolated in meaning from the broader context of dreams throughout one's life, which is why it's so important to log the dreams as much as possible.

Ditto what Ashvin relates here, very much resonating with that view. I have a highly active, vivid, and qualitatively rich dream life, with characters and travels of all kinds imaginable, and while I know there must be periods of deep sleep where there is no discernible or recollectable phenomenal content, nor experience of time, the overall effect is of non-stop dreaming. However, as for the ipseity of the characters, I can only say that in many cases I'm very dubious, but in other cases, albeit quite rare, it seems a solid case could be made for them being conscious agents, based on the convincing quality of the noetic interaction, no less so than the exchanges we have in this forum. So I remain open to the possibility that on some occasions we are interacting with other 'alters' focused in multidimensional dreamtime constructs ~ which could actually be ongoing, and informing us at a subliminal level, 24/7, except that we must tune it out in order to function while intently focused within this consensus construct. Nonetheless, I can't make any definitive claims about this.