I had a strange dream in which I was reading a book about a man who had put his own body back together after he had technically died or was killed. He had carefully set up an extremely elaborate series of eventualities for how muscles would be attached to his skeleton, tissue would be put on those muscles, and so on. Actually I didn’t do much reading (though I often find myself, oddly, doing that in dreams) rather skimmed through the book in a few dream minutes, but it had eerie diagrams of the body in various states of construction. The last steps, when the body was mostly complete, were the hardest to perform, because the whole process was about constructing something from the inside out. Like folding in the last corner when you’re interlocking the flaps of a cardboard box, but a million times harder. This is all difficult to describe, as in dreams you often just know things about your dream world which are inconsistent or highly abstract (and often illogical, yet you never think to question this), or which take the form of images or feelings, which you can never directly show to anyone else. Is this how great minds sometimes conceptualize theories? Like Special Relativity or Wave-Particle Duality. String Theory. Or even something more basic like electron orbital shells. I don’t mean that this has anything to do with dreams, but that it seems likely to me that in these cases, a scientist understood something in a conceptual way which was very difficult to explain to others. Richard Feynman used to think this way, from “what I’ve read”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679747044. He would lie on the floor and curl up or move around in strange patterns in order to feel as if he _were_ an elementary particle, or a mass, or energy, or whatever subject he was trying to grasp, and try to understand from the inside out what made it work, what rules governed it’s behavior and motion. What it would “see” and what it would “think”. So his ideas were no doubt in the form of images and sounds, the kind of thought which is hard to communicate with others, although he was very good at conveying his non-verbal-sense ideas, but still, a lot must have been lost in the process. So that was quite a sudden segue, yes. From dream to reality at the snap of a finger, or a thumb. I know what my dream means, or rather, why I had it. Because there is no meaning. But there is a cause, or rather many different causes, below the images which comprised it.