When you nestle yourself into bed, turn off the bedside lamp and close your eyes to your daytime reality, your "conscious self" goes to sleep. Meanwhile, your "dreaming self" slips out of the covers and tiptoes upstairs to the attic of your mind to explore the enchanted realm of dreams.

I want a dream to take us deeper, to see everything as a gauzy display of images. Dreams help me see through ordinary experiences to their underlying narratives and images and mysteries.

I subscribe to the "sleep on it" school of decision-making, which involves drawing on the wisdom of dreams. Why do we dream? To find answers, resolve emotional conflicts and discharge negativity.

What is a dream? Most dreams, over 90 percent of them, are just unfulfilled desire. Because you have no control over this [desire], you are not playing the desire, the desires are playing you.

Not only are my dreams hopelessly plot-driven and transparent, they are also recurrent. There are four or five dreams that I must have at least once a month, and every time, I wake up bathed in sweat.