The kind of being that things possess, phenomenologically, is as that which stands out from non-being, and so what could properly go by the name of existence. Closer inspection reveals that it is chiefly defined through its contrary, non-existence, nothingness, or the void of annihilation. All of these are rather mysterious principles since while beings arise, subsist and pass away, their non-existence is hypothetical, a sort of inference. Actually, what arises and passes away are forms, eidolons, or indeed idols. It ought not to be necessary to point out that there is no experience whatsoever of nothingness, but it has become a reflex act of faith, almost a moral qualification, to insist with the existentialists that existence is prior to essence, when what is patent to anyone who cares to look that it is fact precisely the other way around. Surely the dreamer knows this better than anyone, and what may be behind his jesting manner, his teasing, is that he has long given up on being able to convince the waking self to surrender his tight grasp upon the notions, the very culture of ontic existence as he imagines it, along with a host of other such stubborn metaphysical axioms and shibboleths.