What is a dream and how do you write one?

For each human experience, there seems to be at least one work of literature that has captured what it is like to have, or to have had, or to be having that experience. This is because great literature is often, though not always, a recreation of life in language so much like life that the reader feels the writer has captured what it is like to live through all that human beings are capable of living through, and much that they cannot live through but can envision. Whether it be acute pain and agony, the touch of an affectionate finger, or the thoughts and feelings of the human mind as it thinks and feels, writers have depicted it so that readers find what they read to be very much like life as they know life to be. Some depictions are abstract, others photogenic, but one way or another literature must be able to make us say, of almost every conceivable event and circumstance: life is like that.