In waking life you are the character, but in dreams you are the scenarist. The character, by nature incomplete, being in default of understanding himself, wants to assemble some basic terms with which to reconcile desires and responsibilities, and so gain a working sense of his legacies, what is received and what is handed on, which would make the way forward clear enough for now. He wishes to proceed without leaving himself behind, to meet himself at the next turning. Only a novelistic imagination can deal with the complexities, with the weird logic by which contingencies accumulate, entailed by the simplest decisions through the multiple points of view and parallel unfoldings and discarded identities that bear on any purposive action no matter how simple. As a character he is necessarily half-blind, but the whole picture is felt to exist somewhere, only not in any one moment, and must finally be reconciled, one way or another. The novel is the idea that this can be done, that a speakable sense rules in the procession of scenes. It is an idea of the dreamer's who seems to be composing his own play, born out of the very light of the mind. You are not your own author, but you believe that authorship exists and prevails over every failure.