The ego binds itself through attachment, as one binds oneself in a dream

The dreamer is not bound by the content of the dream but by their belief in the reality of the dream. When the belief is withdrawn, the chains do not break — they are revealed to have never existed. The Vāsiṣṭha insists on this with a recursiveness that anticipates modern phenomenology: there are no external fetters, no jailer, no cell. There is only the conviction that what is experienced is real in the sense that substantial things are real. Withdrawing that conviction is what the Advaita tradition calls jñāna, and what this verse calls the solution to the riddle of attachment.