If your waking self and your dream self were to meet in a bar what would they talk about? Surely the waking self would be fascinated with the dream self's ramblings, with its slippery and pregnant allusions, with its eccentric charisma, its impervious self-obsession. But the dream self could never engage directly with the waking self's preoccupations, it would behave like a hebephrenic psychoanalyst, undermining and overturning every question, every opening of its partner, displacing the seriousness of connected thought with obscure and below the belt personal references, with puns and with massive irrelevancies seemingly designed to tangle up every thread by dazzling misdirections. The conversation would resemble the text of a post-modern novel. Would the waking self find this valuable, would it begin to doubt itself, or would it grow tired and seek to escape so that it could regain the cool transparency of its own thoughts and the subtle elusiveness of its best intuitions? Would it recognise something vital to its quest, to the attainment of its deepest desires, in the disordered utterances of its dream sibling? Is this something like the relationship of philosophy and poetry?