As imperceptible as the onset of sleep there was the assumption of certain roles, in nightly dreams or waking dreams. Once a situation was given the need for defence required no further defence. This provided a sense of constancy greater than that of the objective world, since that world always appeared in answer to the needs of the situation. A set of insecurities would seem the very measure of reality and the past would be instantly reconfigured as the history of the associated defences and their seasons of success and failure. His need was to see himself as distinctive and definable point in cultural space. What did that mean, finally? That there was a positive articulation between his idea of himself and an idea that he projected into his simulation of a generic mind belonging to a notion of otherness he called his culture. It was through this simulation that he was vulnerable, because he had to keep updating for it to stay congruent with the idea of the world around him. His place, by definition, was itself generic, so that any semblable could occupy it; the point was that he be the very original of all these possible copies. Because of the way that he understood himself there was every chance that an other semblable would prove more real than himself, ad hence that he would be revealed as mere copy, or phoney. Indeed it was a virtual certainty given what stuff he was made of. What saved him from despair was that this certainty was on another level where a good part of him also happened to dwell.