It is a mistake to understand metaphor as merely a figure of speech, for though it is, perhaps, the archetype of these figures, it is more — it is a figure of thought itself, if inner apperception — and, indeed, the capacity to produce powerful metaphors is a demonstration of intimacy that goes beyond and also underlies the literal, though one might observe that there are ‘imposter’ metaphors that better deserve the epithet of ‘parasitic language’ occasionally sprinkled through academic texts.

As to their relationship with dreams, the matter is complicated — since we cannot actually examine or work with dreams — but only with the strange traces our memories likely reform in the image of their own structural necessity and character. Still, there is a relation here, and it is deep. It might be said that many forms of dream are like entering and existing in a world that lies on the strange boundary between reality and metaphor, partaking of both, belonging to both, but the sovereign example of neither. In some common forms of dreaming, examined through recollection, there certainly appears to be a profound and accessible metaphoric substructure. Creatively examined, this thread of related hints and pseudosymbols almost invariably reveals uncommon information and insights.

In fact, it appears that metaphor is, at least potentially, a higher order of language application — a vehicle capable of conveying forms of content that activate and engage both the conscious mind and the sub or unconscious mind, effectively engaging them in mutual activation.

Some might argue that metaphor is the ‘language’ of the subconscious, but I would say it is more like its character than its language. Metaphor is a form of compression, which conveys highly structured ‘possible information’ rather than simply literal information. This is perhaps analogous to handing someone the waveform of a framework, and then asking them to collapse it themselves, for themselves, so that they will experience the result rather than merely hear it. In this sense, it represents an entirely other order of thought, communication, and cognition, and, at least potentially, a communications superpower, because in engaging the subconscious it will likely find long and repetitive re-collapse into novel forms and revelations as the subconscious reprocesses it endlessly as is its spiraline habit.