In any group of explorers, there will be some who insist on miring the adventure into the unknown with a taxonomy. In our case, these armchair psychonauts want to map the entirety of the dream landscape (as if that were even possible), laying their claims like 15th-century navigators, planting a flag in the wet sand of a "newly discovered" island. Once the "world" has been mapped, they can get back to their infinitely recursive arguments about oneiric theory and the issuing of their nth-degree referential manifestos.

Far be it for the rest of us to interrupt their academic circle-jerk, but we have, unfortunately, found a common ground with some of their less egregious terminology. While it might seem that we are cleaving to this same structure that we have eschewed, that we are retreating from the dark corners of the map because they are so dark, we are actually becoming more attuned to the varieties of experience within the Oneiroi. We are, even if they cannot be bothered to notice, discerning some existential distinctions within the layers of the subconscious.

The easiest comparison might be to the five senses. Unless you are confused by synaesthesia (which happens quite often when one first starts traveling in the Oneiroi), you don't confound smell with sight, or sound with touch, or any other sensory odd-coupling. Each sense records and expresses its data type to the brain which, in turn, builds the composite experiential memory. A blind man's experiences will be missing visual cues, but that doesn't invalidate the memory he builds from the remaining sequences of sensory data.

In much the same way, the Oneiroi is a multi-threaded environment. Full immersion means being receptive to the various layers of the dream: from the proleptic fluidity of the hypnagogic fabric, to the tactile flow of the Enhypnic stream, to the empyrean nootropia of the Aserinsky Region, to the epiphanic anachronisms past the Ebbinghaus Proscenium, to the protean subjectivity of the Metaxu, to the macrocosmic sublimation of the Deepdark.

They're meaningless distinctions, you know, nothing more than the desperate attempt of our mind to quantity abstractions. The Oneiroi is a dream, an illusion. It's a consensually shared hallucination. Such an experiential network confounds our definition of reality by the implication that consciousness—wakefulness—is an imposition of ego. What we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is more "real" than what we dream, isn't it?

But that is the heavy-handed cage of the Cartesian Consumer in us. We think, therefore we feel, therefore we are. Thereby instigating the concept of time. "I am" is a point, a completely subjective one, but still a quantifiable point. If you have a grounded reference, you can observe a point distinct from yourself (thereby creating a line), and from there, allow geometry to make the world.

See? We need these laws to be inviolate because they, ultimately, define us. If we can't be defined, then we cease to exist. The Oneiroi, with its multitude of ego-less layers and protean fluidity, confounds the idea of self. It threatens the uniqueness of identity.