The young princess Eve sat hunched over, knees by her ears, on the floor of her ornate bedroom. The room overflowed with the most colorful textiles of the east, the largest jewels of the south, the greatest volumes of the west, and the rarest furs of the north. She bent like a snail and stared at her sex, probing it with her eyes, looking deeper and deeper. "The greatest masters of this technique can see again through their eyes," she said sighing. "But today I see only darkness!" Frustration filled her stomach and throat. She broke her concentration. "Each night I dream the words from my volumes are sown into my textiles.


Our dreams have narrative structures. Something happens in the dream, then another thing happens, then another. What may otherwise be a random assortment of events becomes a connected assortment of events. Dreams don't always follow the logic of our waking narratives. Sometimes we find ourselves flying through the air or breathing under water, sometimes we feel compelled to act but cannot explain why. Dreams can feel overwhelmingly real. So real, in fact, that when we awake we have difficulty distinguishing between the dream narrative and our waking life.

The narrative is what keeps us together and allows for a coherent experience of reality. Things that happen one moment are meaningfully connected to things that happen at another and we establish a sense of continuity, some semblance of cause and effect. Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves; they are the figments tying us down to the earth and together with each other.

Knowledge is narrative. In order to understand an item not previously understood, the item must be connected meaningfully to another item or, better yet, series of items. The relationship between this new item and the previously understood items must be made clear and the new item incorporated. This is what we consider knowledge, the incorporation of an element into a single narrative and even into multiple narratives. These narratives are then woven into metanarrative structures. Indeed, the very possibility that a single element ("apple", for instance) exists in a variety of narratives ("nutrition," "taste," "religion," to name a few) requires us to draw connecting lines between these disparate narratives. Knowledge is very complex precisely because our countless narratives interact as an ecosystem, grouped, ungrouped, all drawing from each other, all linked.

The dream world here is very dangerous for us. Dreams are one clear way of knowing that the coherence we experience in our waking lives may not tell the whole story. More strikingly, however, is that dreams allow us to look upon the reality of our waking lives from a distance. We are struck by the distinct rules of narrative we experience in either reality and then ... We learn a powerful technique to unravel dream narratives to reveal lessons, desires, and other ideas previously hidden. For this technique to function, one must first establish the dream as commentary on waking reality, understanding the dream experience as beneath, and perhaps even subservient to, waking experience. Then we learn to pull abstracting dream events from , and our active minds then turn on waking narratives. We weaken connections previously strong and develop great skills for abstraction that