Pure or raw, the invocation sounds similar. In case you're interested in the term, at this forum I wrote quite a few times about intuition, including Spinoza's and Nietzsche's usage.
What I mean by pure is that pure intuition or pure understanding for that matter are a priori. A pure intuition is knowledge regarding the world independent or untainted by empirical facts.
It's not clear how you'd come to distinguish between dreaming and waking states, or illusions and reality for that matter. A dream can be perfectly reasonable and understandable and surely, at least during the dream, it's rarely being questioned. Normally only after waking up, one concludes it must have been a dream, since it suddenly discontinued without a trace. But how to reason on this within a dream itself? Did you ever find yourself reasoning within a dream on the probability of it being a dream? These are interesting moments (aka "dream lucidity").
While dreaming the existence or nonexistence of the experience usually isn’t considered at all. One who dreams never considers the things within the dream to exist, and whenever it is considered, lucidity is achieved, or the person wakes up. When awake can one think in terms of existence/nonexistence concerning the dream and realize that the things in the dream didn't exist.
It is important to also understand that the things in the dream may exist. We can have no knowledge concerning the dreamed object in itself.
You are asserting an actual thing which just needs to be "uncovered" or studied then? Again you clearly use "raw" and "pure" as quality of observation. Like wiping your camera lens or buying more gear, getting various angles and wider lens, HD immersion?
The actual thing cannot be ‘uncovered’, studied, or known in any way.
I wouldn’t extend the metaphor of lens that far. If one were to adjust a lens, the experience of the object would be altered, but they would not actually gain knowledge of the object in itself.
If it's wholly unknown, it doesn't matter at least until we could relate to it somehow, don't you think? Exit noumenon.
The question however was if you can have a "real thing" in the first place, logically. Not if the observation, the lens of the display is the thing or if the thing is the combination of all kinds of little question marks bound together.
It matters concerning the limitations of knowledge. If by 'real thing' you mean a thing as it truly is in itself, then no one can know whether one can have a real thing. If by 'real thing' you mean a thing which exists, then yes, a real thing can be had.
That's just a declaration! Just as easy to say we experience in everything cause and effect but no free will in anything.
A declaration which I further explained just after it was said.
One can experience a self but it's not a given either. It's possible to claim that no self is being experienced. How to answer to that?
Same form of reasoning could annihilate the idea of experiencing a self, as agency or being and the various choices being made.
annihilate
the idea
The concept of the self or free will is as you put it easily annihilated via pure understanding of causality, but this in no way verifies the actual case, that this is the case of a noumenal self.
We are speaking in terms of ideas, concepts, understanding. We cannot speak in terms of pure intuition, only concepts concerning pure intuition. For instance there is the spatial intuition of space, and there is the understanding of space. The intuition of a circle, for instance, is a drawing of a circle, whereas the understanding of a circle is concepts such as pi*r^2. There is no way that one can gain intuitive knowledge of a circle by explanation. One will never recognize a circle to be a circle via explanation. If you want to teach someone what a circle is, you put pictures of a circles in the textbook.
Another example is color. There is the pure intuition of color, and there is the understanding of color. The pure intuition is color you see before you, and understanding is the various explanations of color such as a scientist describing wavelengths of light or a poet describing color with metaphor. The various colors can be understood to be products of types of eyes, but color in the general sense that things look different is of pure intuition.