In a dream dreamt while napping on the couch, I was designing an organization for a venture in some field of technology. It was all mental, and I was visualizing the composition of skills and experience that people in the organization would require. I saw ideas as words clustered together in a black 3D space, as I might while awake.

In a literal and bright flash of insight came the idea of including in our group a person from the company of programmers that would be hired to implement the concept our organization would come up with. That person would introduce some critical, highly beneficial input from the viewpoint of software design that would advance our product well ahead of others. In the dream, this was an original, powerful and revolutionary idea.

The word I chose to represent that person in my black concept space was 'exponent'. He would be the exponent of software design in our scheme. I was impressed with how appropriately and precisely descriptive the term was, and rather proud at how quickly my mind had produced it.

I woke up in excitement with the word exponent in my mind, still marveling at my powerful business idea and my perfect word for it. As my waking progressed, however, the magic, plasmic glowing aura that framed my insight began to evaporate and my excitement over the idea dissipated. The idea was left standing rather plain and ordinary in the inward gaze of the eyes my mind. The novelty and value were now gone.

Gone also was my appreciation of the term 'exponent'. I thought, 'exponent'? How does that fit the situation? Exponent is from math. I must have meant 'proponent' or something. I'd lost all grasp on the sense of exponent that meant something like 'advocate' or 'proponent'. I'd also completely lost grasp on the excellent business concept that the dream was centrally about. It was no longer held by the fingers of my memory.

As the day progressed, I came to the conclusion that my dream idea was just another case of appealing but deceptive dream nonsense. My doubts on the meaning of exponent also grew until strong enough to make me look the word up in a dictionary. Rather to my surprise, the dictionary told me that an exponent is 'a person who believes in and promotes the truths and benefits of an idea or theory'.

Not infrequently I feel that I am sharing my mind with someone else, someone who is much smarter than me. That smart guy keeps bubbling ideas up to my consciousness and pokes appropriate words out for me at just the right time, even though my inadequate, clumsy intellect fumbles them and doubts them and wonders where they came from. He seems to find me easier to talk to when Iím in dream, be it a night dream or a day dream.

Poor guy. I'm afraid he will finally tire out and stop his frustrating activities altogether.