The fantasy was already here when I arrived; the community of persons was already here, outside my mother's womb. I fell down a rabbit hole, as I recall, and, plop, found myself in the middle of the play. The I who fell was my mother and me. When I found her out here in the fantasy my part in the play began.

According to Freud there is a period in that initial post-partum development when the organs of the fantasy are not yet unifed in such a way as to contitute a whole person. Each organ is pursuing its own pleasure; "polymorphous perversity." It is in relationship with the community of whole persons that these organs of fantasy can learn to co-operate and, like magic, produce something called a person.

The community is the person; a whole person is made up of partial persons. Everything in reality is made of parts. Every real person is simultaneously a partial person; to be a whole person is to be part of a greater whole person. Once in the play there is no exit, through which a whole person can pass. To pass through the exit the person must fall apart. Thus, the play doesn't go on forever. At some point in the play the curtain comes down and the players and audience all go home to bed.

Mybody and Myself are collaborators. The organism employs the desire of the mask, as the mask employs the organism to give it substance. Desire realized is nuclear energy; the real incorporates the fantasy. Nuclear energy fantasized is human desire; the fantasy incorporates the real. It is mutual cannibalism, or, symbiosis. The real, four-dimensional body, is not the origin of the fantastic body. The mask, or covering, and the structure it hangs on originate simultaneously. Human fantasy and the universe of reality, both, originate with a big bang.

A face is a mask that its wearer can't take off. The "organic thing", the real thing is faceless. A face is not perceived it is imagined. A human body is conceived with a face; the face is there at the origin, but inconceivable. The mask is superficial, two-dimensional; it covers the surface of the sphere. The faceless sphere is an abstraction; the abstract alone is real. In my experience the real has always been accompanied by the unreal.

Mybody is real, myself is fantastic.

" Personality is persona, a mask. the world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: 'The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, tho die: it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.' The self does not belong to its possessor. ' He and his body merely provide the peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. The means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg . . . . There will be a team of persons whose activity on stage in conjunction with available props will constitute the scene from which the performed character's self will emerge, and another team, the audience, whose interpretive activity will be necessary for this emergence.' " Love's Body. 90-91. Quoting: Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 252-253.

I arise in the thin air between other players, and an audience. By hanging myself on mybody I give myself substance, I realize the fantasy of myself; myself is a mask which covers mybody. Reality is mybody uncovered. " The means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg. . . ." The fantasy does not emerge from the machinery of reality, rather the fantasy employs the machinery to provide the peg to hang itself on.

With each rising from my bed of dreams I can link all those risings that preceded it. I remember yesterday's awakening which is separated from today's by last night's dream. I can, by focusing my awakened attention upon the task, look at each link in my chain of awakenings. I can remember only a certain number of links before the chain begins to blur. The chain of awakenings becomes a moving film strip and I remember only fragments of the film.

Between every remembered awakening there is a gap of forgetfulness. I cannot recall last night's dream let alone a film strip of past dreamings. Some people have a much greater capacity than I do to call their dreams up before them in the light of day, but this does not alter the fact that dreams resist remembrance. I cannot link them together as with the scenario of myself; I cannot remember myself from my dreams.

Sleep overcomes, it comes over mybody like the dream comes over myself. It is a covering that relaxes the demands of the reality principle. The womb is protection from reality. Dreaming is regression, a movement backward toward the origin of myembodiedself. Originally, I thought I was the world and the world was me and then, as things developed, I woke up and found myself in a real world.

Like the tide I move in and out of wakefulness and dream. Every twenty-four hours this movement repeats itself. Each morning with the rising sun, I am reborn, born again from my mother's womb, carried out of the dream into the real world. Some desire that does not belong to me carries me out. Or is she pushing? Once out I must act; reality will not support passivity; the real world ain't your mama's womb. In reality the dreamer has to go to work.

I work because my mother has cast me out, or, because I felt that she was trying to smother me and I began working my way out of her now fatal embrace. Mybody and myself grow tired of work, and I begin to feel her pulling me back in. At some point of time within each twenty-four hour cycle, I cease working and fall back into the passivity of her embrace. No work is necessary to the dream.

We never completely separate from her who mothers us; we are tethered to mother's womb. Birth is always and only re-birth. The fantastic body is never fully realized; the fruits of my labor are temporary. We are homeless; there is no place to call home, neither in reality nor in the dream; we are compelled to keep moving, in and out.