I should talk about language, talk about how the Oneiroi subverts and informs language. The nominal psychologist relies on more than just the patient's ability to communicate with words. He reads the patients' physical traits, their idiomatic twitches and unconscious signals, their reactions to the proximity of external objects: in short, their body language. Yes, it is still language.

An oneironaut can never forget that the patient's dream world has been wholly generated by that individual's mind, regardless of how real it may seem. Everything—the heat, the light, the color, the movement, the scent—is a signal from their unconscious. Even when you shift into the Oneiroi, you are still bound to your patient in a focalized relationship.

It is their narrative. It can never be completely objective, and it is indelibly shaped by their psyche. The oneironaut must remain aware of the distinction between the focalizer and the narrator.

Which makes my crisis so awkward and strange. I feel like a stranger in my own dreams. I feel adrift in lands that I don't control. That I haven't formed. I certainly don't understand all the rules. There are too many shadows, too many blank areas that are impenetrable.

It hasn't escaped me that this is a classic manifestation of schizophrenia. I have dealt with a few, and the dichotomy between the external and internal is usually easy to discern. Most divisions are usually binary—on or off, black and white, good and bad. It is rare to find someone who has split more than once and, even then, the divisions are still distinct like sections of an orange. An equal number of separate slices that cling together to make the whole, but that can be peeled off.

I'm not belittling schizophrenia. It can be a very divisive mental rift and can cause serious trauma to a patient. But within the Oneiroi, such mental rifts are obvious. You can see the walls that have been erected, the bridges that have been torn down; you can reach through the gaps that have been formed. All of these structural disparities can be easily fixed.

Where was I? Oh yes, language. I know the tongue of the unconscious. I grok the symbolic lingua. I can speak like a native in any dream.

But I am adrift in my own. Disconnected. I am awkward like a first-year language student trying to find their way around the teeming metropolitan heart of a foreign country. The echoes are all different and wrong, like a different mythology is at work in the Oneiroi. I am Jesuit who has washed ashore in 15th-century South America. I am an ancient Greek mariner who is being asked to pilot a 747. I am a Neolithic hunter working with modern surgical equipment. I am . . .

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