Now…a dream isn’t what you remember. And a memory isn’t a description that you make from it. And a description isn’t a plot that you abstract from the description. And scenes falling in a sequence (to which they may not originally have been subject) are not a plot.

So when you describe to me a selection of scenes, and identify this as ‘a dream’ are you aware that nearly all of what you are saying has almost nothing to do with a dream, and everything to do with a long chain of linked abstraction methods whose results are more properly understood as an artifact of the interactions of memory, the desire to record or communicate, and language?

And this is how it is with much of what we talk about. We talk about the structure of how we are used to talking about things, and we believe that to be accurate talk about reality or experience. Not only is that absurd, it is impossible. Language is too small a fraction of experience to somehow encompass it, yet in our minds even a single word can rise up and replace experience, identity, sensing and memory.

Tree, for example.