Where there are goals and sub-goals there has to be accountability,
that is, does the sub-goal help to achieve the goal that it is subordinate
to? In the case of
goals pursued by the awake and conscious mind, this accountability can be
identified with "reward" and "punishment", "happiness" and "sadness", and
"feeling good" and "feeling bad", elusive though a precise description of these
concepts may be.
If the dream-maker pursues its own special goals
distinct from those of the waking conscious mind, then it must have its own
separate system of accountability. There will have to be some measurement as to
how "successful" given dreams are, and some feedback of that measurement into the
systems that control the behaviour of the dream-maker, that is, the creation
of dreams in the future.
To give a simple example of how this applies,
suppose that a given dream becomes lucid. The lucidity results in a loss of
intensity of experience, and this is measured as a reduction in successfulness,
which must be applied as a "punishment" to the dream-maker. The dream-maker
responds to this punishment by attempting to restore the desired state of
non-lucidity.