We may be able to understand self-awareness by studying, physiologically and phenomenologically, regular dreaming (which lacks self-awareness) and lucid dreaming (which has self-awareness). From one viewpoint, lucid dreaming isn't fundamentally different from other dreaming; in any dream the dreamer has access to some information, and the piece of information a lucid dreamer has is that he/she is dreaming. But this difference of just one piece of information changes everything. It enables experiencing the dream in a richer, deeper, fundamentally different way, and it sometimes even enables the dreamer to control the dream world. By analogy, perhaps it is self-awareness in the waking world that enables control and freedom that an entity without self-awareness lacks. Not total control or freedom, admittedly, but a control and freedom (and depth and richness) different from a life on autopilot not just in magnitude but in kind.