All the three states are made of the same substance, whether it is dreams, deep sleep or waking.

Just as a stone, a tree, a straw, grain, a mat, a cloth, a pot, and so on, when burned, are reduced to earth (from which they came), so the body and its sense organs, on being burned in the fire of Knowledge, become Knowledge and are absorbed in Brahman, like darkness in the light of the sun.

All the three states are made of the same substance, whether it is dreams, deep sleep or waking. All the object and sense perception is of the same substance. This is the great lesson to be learnt by the seekers of truth.

The three divisions of time--past present and future--are within the waking or dream.  It becomes necessary to analyze the three states. Whatever may come in the future, whatever objects existed in the past, whatever thing one can think of in the present--all these are possible only in waking experience. Waking or dream consists of names and forms.” All names are but words.  The waking is parallel dream and dream is parallel waking.  The formless knower of the three states, which comes and goes, is within the three states but it is apart from the three states. It is within the three states as their formless substance and it is apart from the three states as their formless witness.  Thus judging and reasoning the truth on the waking entity is erroneous because the self is neither the waking entity nor the dream entity. Thus the self is not the form but formless consciousness, which pervades all the three states. 

All the three states are got from the consciousness (soul), corresponding to formlessness. One has to mentally merge waking into dreams, then merge dream into deep sleep. And finally he has to merge into Consciousness.

Any experience, is part of the mirage, and hence a superimposition. Consciousness is the substratum of the experience of all the three states. 

Gaudapada’s rational exposition of Advaita: - that whatever is seen, whether external or internal, whether by the ordinary persons or yogis, is unreal.