The Dreamer and the Dream Even after all these years of dreaming I am still amazed by the complexity and originality of the "props" that lie scattered across the dream stage. One of my dreams, for example, contained a carefully written letter from a past love that included a map of the Pacific coast near Seattle with a cardboard sailing ship sailing slowly from south to southwest as I lifted the page. He was so smart that I wondered out loud "how did he do that?" and turned the page to discover a small crack made rigid with a careful coating of black wax. The vessel was secured by a pin passing through the slot; the pin had a small black plastic cap that held it in place. The mechanism was made in such a way that the force of gravity caused a majestic procession of the ship shortly after the page was lifted. So that's how the letter worked, but how did the dream itself work? I won't ask what it "means", but, in general, how do dreams do what they do? Are there any patterns we can detect? If I could turn my dream upside down, what kind of pins and cracks would I find? The basic pattern I perceive is a dichotomy, two distinct and often opposing forces: the dreamer and the dream. The dreamer is like a lame version of my waking "self." Perspectives in a dream often change in bizarre ways - one minute I'm watching a movie, the next minute I'm in the movie, first as one character, then as another - but generally there is an "I" in the dream. When people describe dreams they say "I did this. Then I saw that." Despite all the changing images, we perceive ourselves as if we were "in" the dream. But the self in the dream is different from the self I experience in waking life. For one thing, I can't think clearly in dreams. I have had dreams in which I struggled for a long time with some simple mathematical problem; upon awakening the answer is obvious. Sometimes I try to take notes in my dreams but without success: the "me" of the dream cannot read. (I can "pretend to read", that is, I can look at a newspaper or a letter and appear to be reading a story, but I don't actually see the words; even if I try to write I can't see the actual words I've written.