ABSTRACT
The most absolute and unmediated form of embodied imagination is a dream. It instantaneously presents a total world, so real that you are convinced you are awake. You don't just think so, you know it in the same way you now know you are awake reading this book. This constant, worldcreating fact has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and my entire life has been organized around this simple insight. I ®nd this permanent act of creation a miracle, on a par with the creation of the universe itself. My appreciation has made me travel all over the globe in order to ®nd out how other people dream. And indeed, the all-encompassing power of dreaming is the same for everyone I've talked to: while dreaming we ®nd ourselves in an environment so utterly real that we call it a dream only upon waking, when it gets de®ned by the particular cultural context into which we wake. A positivist scientist may wake into the understanding that he has just experienced the utter nonsense of a brain trying to make sense of cerebral noise, an Aboriginal Australian may have received word from the ancestors, a psychologist may assume that she has just observed a meaningful display related to her daily life or distant past, which needs symbolic decoding. However, whatever their waking culture, before they woke up they were each experiencing basically the same set of phenomena: a world perceived as real, presenting itself as physical, peopled by characters who display their own intentions, accompanied by physical sensations (heartbeat, respiration), sometimes strong enough to make them wake up.
