You could then use the dream to learn more about yourself, others, the world, and the nature of life. You can come awake in the matrix and realize you're the one in your own dream. People on the spiritual path can do that, thus they can avoid wasting the whole night, and use it in a developmental, nice way.

Everyone has the same life purpose, which is the quest of happiness for oneself and for others.

That love, in the sense of wishing their happiness, will cause your actions to be effective in relation to that person.

However, because of your interconnectedness with all things, other beings still have a problem, and when you realize that you have no absolute self apart from things, you realize that essentially, you are all the other beings.

The saying "no self, no problem" probably comes from Zen. In their cultures, where Buddhism is kind of taken for granted, as well as karma, causality, former and future life, and the possibility for becoming enlightened, then it's safe to skirt the danger of nihilism, which would be, I don't exist because Buddha said I have no self, and therefore I have no problem because I don't exist. That would be a bad misunderstanding. But in those cultures, it would not be as easy to have that understanding as it would be here in the west, where we really are nihilistic.

Nonviolence against humans cannot take firm hold in society as long as brutality and violence are practiced toward other animals.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.