> #1: Dream Knowledge
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> Have any of you ever experienced a sudden insight or moment of enlightenment in the middle of a dream that you wanted to cling to upon waking, but just couldn't hang onto? I'm not talking about anything profound like the Ultimate Truth or a sudden full understanding of the opposite sex. I'm talking about little stuff...trivial knowledge, tantalizing tidbits of info that would have been lovely to keep.
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Well, I once had a paltry insight that the nonsensical name for the 'butter-fly' insects flying around in my dream was, in fact, a silly rearrangement of another term, 'flutter-by.' But upon awakening, I realized that this 'insight' was just a trivial Spoonerism of little consequence. I would think that the kind of momentous insights from dreams which people usually cite are like the German chemist Friedrich Kekulé's waking dream of "whirling atoms twisting in snakelike motion," which he supposedly had while struggling to find the structure of the aromatic benzene hydrocarbon molecule. (He envisioned a snake biting its own tail and, upon waking, realized that benzene has the form of a ring. Then there's that other story where Samuel Coleridge claimed to have dreamed the beginning of the famous 'Xanadu' poem while under the influence of an opium anodyne, only to be rudely interrupted by a "person from Porlock," right?) I don't know, there are probably other examples of "dream insights" resulting from potentially creative synthesis as released from the strictures of the conscious mind.


> In my case, I had a sudden insight into cultural and linguistic labels applied to complex extended family structures in Japanese culture (translation: what you'd call the in-laws and cousins and steps), but upon waking it all dissolved into a jumble of confused, meaningless syllables and decomposed thoughts. [...]
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> So, anyone have a similar experience?
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> -Trunks

The strict sequence of Chinese family structures and of near and far blood relationships is equally complex. It's amazing that there are actually unique terms for "elder sister's third younger son's wife's fifth niece's brother-in-law." Whew.

Wolf "is probably now doomed to dream that her Six Degrees of Separation from SAM goes through the intermediary of several people called DAVE" spirit