The pleasure is mine. It's, indeed, a great conversation. Here are some further points I'd like to address.
“Personally experiencing the otherworld, 7th heavens and all that.”
If I may suggest, don't get too hung upon that. If you were not told about otherworld or 7th heaven, you would probably not even think about it. Trying to access them, even though it's not impossible, is just trying to recreate the exact same experience someone before you had while accessing the data encoded in causal streams / state of universe. If you ever got your hands on information in an unconventional manner (dream, vision, etc.) that later proved to be factual (or some similar experience, and I would say that your “pink upload” counts as such), you are already accessing those “realms”. As I see it, we access the parts of data where our undivided attention is directed. Sometimes those are rather unexpected “places”, and, of course, we perceive them according to our own personal conditioning, translated into our very private (and unique!) symbolic language.
“The next dream is a new universe.”
While this may apply for the original dream because, as you also noticed, there is literally a blank canvas, it's certainly not true for the dreams emerging within it as they are already conditioned by their container dream. For example, I regularly meet the same people in my dreams, sometimes I even visit the same places, and there was a period when I had dreams in which I had memories of other dreams. Though to be completely honest, I'm not completely certain, whether I really remembered other dreams or just had memories of dreams that actually never happened. Weird but funny stuff.
What I want to say – while this particular cosmic dream lasts, “I” will see the same universe through all entities born within it. And yes, simultaneously a new meta-cosmos of that particular entity is born. Unique but already dependent on the rules of the original dream. Subsequently, while that person is alive, all their dreams are shaped by that container meta-map.
“why awareness began to move [...] it's probably safe to assume it was intentional rather than a fluke or some tragic accident”
Some people say that Maya is inscrutable. It makes a lot of sense because before the movement starts there is no intent, fluke, or accident. My best guess is that it has something to do with self-realization. As when you transition from deep sleep into REM – the images are triggered by a sudden “A-ha!” that you are. On the other hand, it may be that that “A-ha!” comes from emergence of images – there is suddenly a mirror in which one can see oneself. It's really hard to say because it happens simultaneously. Well, Maya is inscrutable.
