Dreams, Art and Virtual Worldmaking

This paper examines the possible role of dreams and other forms of virtual worldmaking (chiefly fictions) in forming and maintaining our adaptive systems. I posit no exclusive function for the dream. Rather, I treat it a an extension of fiction's preoccupation with our daily concerns, desires and fears. I suggest that narratives help us to enlarge and revise our perceptual and response systems, not by offering us moral or ethical propositions to live by but by increasing certain skills in our mental organization. Departing from John Paulos' idea that fictions and mathematics (narratives and numbers) work in similar ways, I further examine the role that probability ratios might play in dreams, despite the seeming bizarreness of many dreams. The overall idea is that narratives of all sorts are one cognitive means, among many, by which we accumulate sums of knowledge and expectation, and maintain and revise our notions of what goes with what in human experience. I also look briefly at fictional archetypes (Oedipus, Orestes/Hamlet, etc.) and universal dreams (falling, being lost or attacked, etc.) as master plots in our probability systems.