5 ideas
The self is neither a fixed inner entity nor an illusion to be dissolved. It is a process of 'I-making' in which the brain, body and social world keep building a sense of 'me' and 'mine' from moment to moment. Because it is enacted rather than found, the self can be real as a construction while having no unchanging essence.
In a lucid dream the dreamer realizes they are dreaming while the dream continues, which shows that watching mental contents can be pulled apart from being absorbed in them. The shift runs from a 'dream ego' caught inside the imagined world to a witnessing awareness that sees the dream as appearance. This gives an experimental model of what meditation aims to cultivate in waking life.
Dreams are better modeled as imagining than as perceiving false things. The dreamer usually occupies an imagined self-within-the-world, much as in daydreaming or mind-wandering, rather than being fooled by fake percepts. This places dreaming on a continuum with waking imagination and the brain's default network rather than treating it as a malfunction of perception.
Indian traditions such as Advaita Vedanta and Yoga hold that dreamless sleep is a mode of consciousness, pointing to the memory-like report 'I slept peacefully and knew nothing.' This challenges the neuroscientific default that deep sleep is blank. It suggests experiments, such as meditators reporting awareness during slow-wave sleep, that could separate the absence of contents from the absence of awareness.
Death is better seen as an extended process of consciousness unwinding, with changing mental states along the way, than as a single biological instant. Seeing it this way treats near-death experiences and contemplative dying practices as data about how the mind comes apart. It also shows why brain-death criteria can be pragmatic cultural conventions rather than a clean line in nature.