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Time is an artifice? That's another thing. I hate it when things are all in my head but they don't go away when I close my eyes and think wonderful thoughts.

Oh yeah? Well, often I realize, in the middle of a dream, that I'm in fact dreaming. At this point I often try to change the circumstances of the dream - make other actors go away, make objects in my way disappear, make my lover more handsome, etc. - but they don't obey me! It all keeps going on just as before. Just like it happens when I'm not dreaming. So maybe I'm just not concentrating harder, and by the same token you aren't concentrating hard enough when you close your eyes when you're awake.

The obvious conclusion is: Either our dreams are actually just as real as the world we experience while awake, or else if we would just learn to concentrate better in our waking hours, the physical world around us would change in accordance with our thoughts. (IOW, we haven't found the right "secret knowledge". I'm sure somebody has it on a website somewhere...)

First an observation or two, then the Vade Theory of Dreams. Lots of my dreams seem to be about looking for lost objects or locations. In one case I left my car and went around the corner on an errand. When I came back, not only was the car not there but the street was different. It had a suburban rather than downtown look and the slope of the land had changed. Often, I leave a meeting (or party or whatever) for just a bit and can't find it again. Or I put down an object and it's gone. A unifying theme seems to be that once something strays out of my visual field, there's a less-than even chance of getting it back.

A one-shot anecdote: Just once in my life, I've had visual input from a dream persist after I was awake. Inside a dream a wasp hovered right in front of my face. I jerked so violently that I started awake. In the middle of my visual field, the wasp still hovered. Meanwhile, my peripheral vision showed my room in dawn light. The dream wasp stayed for maybe ten seconds before breaking up.

What I think it means: You can't steer dreams very well because at bottom there's something like a random shape generator projecting onto a screen inside your head. Then the rest of your brain goes nuts matching the noise with your grab bag of memories, fears, preoccupations, etc. It's something like seeing shapes and faces in clouds, only your brain is very good at imposing its match.

Not very Freudian, is it?