Here’s an interesting quote from Neville Goddard:

“Well, I am not denying that sleeping man firmly believes that is the way things happen. When a man awakes he realizes that everything he encounters is apart of himself, and what he does not now comprehend, he knows, because the eye is opened, that it is related by affinity to some as yet unrealized force in his own being; that he wrote it but he has forgotten it, that he slapped himself in the face but he has forgotten it; that within himself he started the entire unfolding drama, and he looks out upon a world, and it seems strange to him, because most of us in our sleep are totally unaware of what we are doing from within ourselves.

It will not take you years to prove it; what I tell you now may startle you; it may seem to be bordering on insanity for the insane believe in the reality of subjective states and the sane man only believes in what the senses will allow, what they will dictate, and I’m going to tell you when you begin to awake, you assert the supremacy of imagination and you put all things in subjection to it. You never again bow before the dictates of facts and accept life on the basis of the world without.

When the eye opens it knows that what is an idea to sleeping man is a fact to the awakened imagination, an objective fact, not an idea.

I entertain the idea of a friend and I make some wonderful concept of him in my mind’s eye and when I sleep it seems to be a wish, it seems to be the longing of my heart, but purely subjective, just an idea. And the eye within me opens, and he stands before me embodying the quality that I desired in my sleep to see him express.

So what is an idea to sleeping man, the unawakened imagination, is an objective reality to awakened imagination.”