1. Free Write

            It's probably my four semesters of Aristotelian philosophy that leads me to begin every project with a definition.  I supposed that I find it to help what people think something means before we get into what it actually means.  Dictionary definitions are always so neat and so limited.  I suppose that's what makes language such a toy for the educated mind -- its intrinsic transcendence, its contradictory impulses between bounding an idea and extending it.

            This can connect to dreams of course, as dreams do the same for our imagination.  Dreams are rarely illogical, though they can be counter-logical.  They generally run with a logic all their own, a vocabulary and a grammar that shares the superficial aspects of our everyday language but with new and hidden meanings.  Dreams make connections between items that share none; they make -- or uncover -- meaning where it does not, or did not, exist.

Of course, a lot of these connections simply don't parse in the waking world and thus we forget in moments what we spend a night constructing.  Yet the dreams we do remember must have meaning, no matter how jumbled and obscure our recollection of them, for the meaning is what causes us to remember them.  And, without getting too Carl Jung, it must be that the symbols have some shared, or transmittable, meaning, because so many of the same images arise in the dreams of so many people.  Dreams speak to us across our cultural and experiential divides.