Humans have always sought to find meaning in dreams. These strange absurdist parables that take shape in an infinite virtual space behind our eyes, when we lose control of our limbs and lose contact with our senses, seemed at one time to be coded communications from God or at the least intimations of what is to come. Dreams tell us things we don’t know. Their elements are symbolic, and we know that symbols point elsewhere and have a purpose.

I believe that dreams return us to a state akin to that of our pre-verbal ancestors, who communicated in what Tomasello calls a “natural language” of imaginative pretense. The prelinguistic human was able to enact stories to reproduce situations in order to warn, explain or entertain, and then to apply those little dramas metaphorically to other situations. Lakoff argues that these basic embodied metaphors underlie our “civilized” verbal communication as well, although we are often unaware of the original storied sources of our abstract ideas. Dreams bring us back into contact with that original imagery. They send us into an immersive virtual world, a seemingly mind-independent “reality,” in which the stories behind our ordinary language – ancient, cultural and personal — take concrete shape around an active protagonist adapting to a world generated by their own mind. By acting within these condensed fictional parables, we are able to evolve the narrative schemas or storylines behind our current problems in living.