Have you ever noticed that sometimes dreams have set-ups and pay-offs? I had one last night in which I was doing something or other when I saw a small group of people that looked like a cross between Devo and a diver from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – they had these coloured breathing apparatus on. They didn’t serve any real function in the rambling story of the dream – they were just there. I noticed them and moved on.

So the dream continues and I’m trying to outrun something. Anyway, I get to this cliff-edge and I have to jump off into the water. But guess what? I can’t because the group of divers are down there swimming around in the water!

So what’s going on here? If the story was being constructed by my brain, then how come I didn’t know that the divers were a set-up when I first saw them? It was like I was watching a story constructed by someone else and they wanted to establish that these divers exist in the world so that later on in the climax they could use them as an obstacle for the main character - me. See what I mean? It was good storytelling. Bad storytelling would have had the divers just appear in the end as deus ex machina.

But who is setting this stuff up? How come I experienced the story for the first time even though I had made it up? How did I not know that the divers would come back later? How can my brain be one step ahead of… my brain?