We are like the dreamer who lives inside the dream - but who is the dreamer ?

Alena, thank you. Your proposal helped me make sense of ideas about the self I have felt unable or unwilling to transform into something tangible. 

The self as a process makes immediate sense because reality is impermanent; waves constantly colliding, collapsing, and transformed by each and every interaction. Furthermore this process is neither linear nor scientific, it does not take place in the space of classical physics since it cannot be observed directly but only through its manifestations.

As far as we can prove there are only two states in reality (observable and unobservable) - what we call truth or fact is simply a consensus that holds until it is successfully challenged and therefore forms a new consensus. This is essentially what Hegel saw as the motor of history, and it is observable at the level of the self much as it is observable in the movement of planetary bodies.

I said at the beginning I was unwilling to turn my feelings about the self into words - to my mind it is a similar dilemma to posing the question “who is the dreamer ?” - in the end the dreamer and the dream are a singular process and so the question is either uninteresting or irreverent.

I find the analogy of an artist to be instructive to demonstrate this point - consider a reframing; “we are like the artist who lives inside their art, but who is the artist ? “. My first years of making art i was overly concerned by this question, and so I read and watched numerous biographies of artists which tell you ‘x was born in (y) and beaten by his parents (p) before going to study at (z) where they met (c) and eventually the output is their their art (a). However a biography cannot answer the question ‘who is the artist?’, it is simply a description of observable or documented processes hinting at what is ultimately unobservable.

Indeed the artist cannot answer the question ‘who is the artist?’ because they do not know and cannot know because there is nothing to know. All we can substantively engage with is the art or the dream as an inseparable whole together with the artist or dreamer - the observable portion of the process, everything else is speculation or conjecture. 

The very same conclusion is to be reached in physics with the question ‘who or what is reality?’ - well it is a collection of intangibles that cascade upwards into the observable and therefore tangible reality - but I can never really answer the question if I cannot account for the intangibles, which beyond the level of classical physics we cannot and probably never will. It will forever be a question of the scientist and technologist concerned with adjustments to the tangible, but the artist, as the dreamer, are translators of the intangible. And so the question of what is the self becomes as you suggest, it is a process, but to what end? It is a process of translating the intangible into the tangible, the soul into art, neurons into dreams.