The difference between dreaming and being awake is that the identity and stories of your dreams change every time, while the identity and stories of your waking state remain unchanged throughout the linear time of your ordinary life.
Every time you fall asleep and dream, you move into different realities, while when you wake up you always return to the same reality.
As human beings, we return to the same waking state every time. This awakening is actually a re-dream.
We only know how to re-dream one dream, but we are unable to re-dream others. When we actually dream we are not even able to decide which dream to dream, so the option is either to wake up in the dream of ordinary life or to dream countless dreams, without having any control over how they are generated, how to choose them and how to re-dream them.
As long as you just wake up, you are the victim of a mandatory dream, of the monopoly of conscience, of separate reality. The first step along the path of liberation consists in learning to select which dream to dream and to re-dream it whenever you want. This means learning to live both here, in the dream of ordinary reality, and in another dream, which you have decided, to which you return regularly.