What is strange in dreams is not that as the dreamer we find ourselves in a strange place but that we don't find the world we inhabit, the dream-world, at all strange until we wake up and reflect on it. If the sense of strangeness were to grow too strong then it would rouse us by activating an alert study of our surroundings - although in lucid dreams some degree of reality testing is compatible with continuing to dream. There is no sense of thrownness in dreams because there is an almost boundless ability to take things for granted. The dreamer is not the final representative of the dreaming mind, but merely its vehicle, the protagonist of the fiction it is weaving. The dreaming mind is aware of itself as the creator of its own dream experience, aware of itself in the role of author rather than as, or as well as, character. The character may be placed in a world that he struggles to make sense of, and one of the things that haunts him can be the peripheral awareness of the mind's work of scene setting, potentially appropriable, but which disappears every time just as he turns towards it. This is the source of the odd déjà vu vu like quality that can often infect dreams. In a dream thought the distinction between author and character, as two ways in which the meaning of a content gains embodiment, is fluid - and at a deeper level is non-existent. And it is why it is almost impossible to grasp a dream thought with the waking mind, precisely because the unconscious, or rather what the waking mind would refer to as unconscious thinking, is nothing at all like a language.