The emotions invoked within a dream are a further fact about the dream, beyond the narrative and the sensory experience. Once a person has finished telling you all the mundane, nonsensical details of their dream, they have failed to impart the powerful emotions, the experiential gestalt, the sense of awesome import that moved them to recount the dream in the first place.

I tell them, "There was a toy bunny on a white field ... it was horrifying." The listener is unimpressed by this, because seeing a toy bunny is not a reason to feel horror. In this way, stories about dreams are not like stories about real life. I could say, "There was a toy bunny on a white field, and this was the most terrifying thing in the universe." But that is confusing the order of things: I saw a toy bunny, I experienced a profound horror, and I projected that horror onto the bunny.

The dreams that I tell people are the ones with the coolest-sounding stories, not the dreams that mean the most to me.