»Zion is a dream as this world is a dream«

I don't understand all this discussion, as for me it's quite obvious. The human mind need a paradigm to opearate and the paradigm acts as a limit to it, as well as giving to it the ability to opearate. Thinking without a paradigm is really hard. And you always end up building another paradigm. (what I am presenting here, btw is my own paradigm, take it or leave it)

This world is a dream. When you wake up (you become an awakened) you see that this is a dream. And then you get powers. Like when you wake up in a dream and then you have fun flying or however you want. But then your mind needs to carve a bigger explenation. And that is when you awaken from a dream... into another dream. And that is what happened to Neo and to all the others.

But, you see, there is no... external world to which to wake up.

So Neo woke up from a dream. Found himself in another dream, and woke up again. But this time he did not built another dream.

You could say that if you want to use human beings as source of power you need to give them free will (or they have nothing to strive for, and it is the striving that is really giving you energy). If you give them free will some of them will turn toward spirituality, and eventually awaken themselves. And the matrix movies tried to explain this by saying: every time a Zion was destroyed a new one would emerge (or similar, I saw 2 of the movies only one time).

At the end the solution for a truly awakened individual is just to chose a nice dream and cook cookies, while helping human beings when possible. And this is what the Oracle was doing.