After having read your comment, I can say with certainty that this is not the level of doubt I have. I do in fact dream by experiencing actual visual qualia. An

After having read your comment, I can say with certainty that this is not the level of doubt I have. I do in fact dream by experiencing actual visual qualia. And not just visual, really, but of all senses. This does not happen every night, but the feeling when it does not is one of forgetting the dream after I wake up, not of the dream not having detail. Sometimes I'll remember the actual sensory details of a dream immediately upon waking, but forget it later on in the day, leaving me only with vague impressions like you say. It also does not feel as if I am fabricating the details upon retrieval of memory, since the memory of the sensory information is immediate and fades with time, the same experience as when you see something, but then look away. At first, you'll have a strong memory of the sensory experience, but gradually it fades. So unless I am for some reason able to instantly fabricate strong sensory information from a vague concept only upon waking up, but not, say, hours or days later, then this theory does not explain my particular experience. For some particular dreams, I remember vivid imagery and other sensory information years after they happened. Meditation and dream journals seem to increase the effect of either having or remembering dreams with vivid sensory information for me. Your comparison with waking memories and experience seems apt, because the two phenomena (dream experiences and waking experiences) seem like they are one and the same, perhaps only differing in average ability to retain memory or salience of experience. And just as some dreams are less salient than others (at least if going by strength of memory), waking situations tend to also differ in this regard. When you are on autopilot or lost in thought, your awareness of your surroundings and of the happenings around you decrease, and so does the salience and strength of the resultant memory of the experience. This makes me think the only real difference between dream experience and waking experience (for me) is the level of awareness/consciousness, which tends to be lesser for dreams, but not necessarily so (i.e. there is overlap).