The Mind of Clear Light
If you close your eyes in a bright room or outside, notice the colors that you see on the inside of your eyelids. Most see an orangey like color. Notice this color.
Keeping eyes closed, now notice what "it" is that is noticing the colors.
There is an "awake awareness" in which the orange color is appearing. What is this "awake awareness"?
Now cover your eyes and notice the darkness. Is the "awake awareness" the same as when seeing the orange color? Notice how the "awake awareness" is a constant while the appearances are always changing.
That "awake awareness" is the "Mind of Clear Light".
It's easy to notice the "awake awareness" with various sensory perceptions, during the occurrence of the perceptions.
But now, with eyes closed, let yourself daydream a bit and notice if the "awake awareness" is as notable as while seeing the colors with closed eyes. It can be discovered that it is much more of an either/or; either you fully experience the day dream or you notice the "awake awareness", but not both at the same time.
That's because day dreaming, night dreaming, thinking and conceptualizing all diminish the vivid "awake presence" of awareness. The awareness is always present but it's self-knowing vividness isn't. The energetic vividness becomes invested into the mental fabrications.
This is why we get "lost" sometimes in our day dreaming. It's even more true while dreaming at night. Our consciousness within the dream has lost all its clarity as regarding who or what it's actual condition is. The heavier or more dense the mental fabrication whether as thinking, day dreaming or night dreaming; the less "awake awareness" is oriented to its true condition.
Samsara is day dreaming. Upon a moment of consciousness "waking up" from all thinking and day dreaming, the wisdom and awake qualities of the Mind of Clear Light become self-illuminating spontaneously.
The Mind of Clear Light is our Buddha Mind. It's the empty, aware space that hosts all its energetic expressions. While in a physical embodiment, it's provisionally localized behind the forehead and slightly above the eyes.
All experience occurs in that empty aware space, like holograms appearing in an empty mirror. The quality of knowing awareness belongs only to the empty mirror, never to the appearances.
We never see the "outer world" as out there, although it seems so, but we only experience the mind's sensory perceptions and "objects" within our inner space; the Mind of Clear Light.
From experience, it seems the Mind of Clear Light has the capacity to invest its cognitive energy into day dreaming, night dreaming, thinking; or not.
Otherwise no exit from samsara could be possible; the looping of self-centered day dreaming would go on endlessly.
The continuity of the samsaric trance occurs much like a flow of electricity in a car battery. The positive pole of the battery is the arising of a subjective self which due it's being a fixed element in mind, draws energy from the negative pole of stored samsaric traces, conditioning and memory, continuously.
Without the terminal or pole of a subjective self, the flow of samsaric mentation ceases immediately. All of this is occurring within the Mind of Clear Light, behind the eyes and forehead.
You and a Buddha have the identical Mind of Clear Light. In your case your mind is beclouded by daydreaming and thinking; a Buddha is not daydreaming or thinking, hence the Buddha's totally clear, cognitive capacity is imbued with intrinsic wisdom, uncaused joy, telepathy and clairvoyance.