There is no sensible way in which, when it comes to the formation of individual personalities, we can separate what we call "socialization" from what we call "personal experience". If I have an experience of my mother telling me to put my napkin on my lap (socialization) this experience is just as much a determining factor in my personality as an experience of my father explaining the Newtonian concept of gravity to me as a child (personal experience). The experience of my father teaching me of Newtonian gravity might help determine what will later be my personal interests (I may go on to become interested in science or physics), just as my mother telling me to put my napkin on my lap will help me form a personality that will "fit in" with the rest of society. In both cases, my personality is formed by experiences. It is my view that my brain takes in individual experiences, and does not distinguish between "socialization" experiences and ones that are particular to me, in the formation of my personality.

But how does the brain process experiences, to find out what aspects of experience are "significant", and which to emphasize? What is the process by which associations that are socially and personally relevant become more apparent to consciousness in everyday life and the formation of what we call our "world"?

Suppose the brain merely took in experience, without any sort of organizing or sorting through it for relevant associations, what to emphasize and what to tune out in my perceptions during things like a cocktail party, and what meaning to give different concepts and objects of perception. Obviously, life would be like some sort of daze, wherein each perception is completely new and unrelated to anything else, where a view of people at a beach does not emphasize the people, or any particular one that strikes us, over the look of the sand or seaweed on the shore.

Merely our sensations, which, without our particular context of past sensations and our "life", would not be what we call a "world", in which sensations form a sensible whole. Sensations on their own, without such context, are chaotic and overwhelming, in which nothing stands out from anything else as having "meaning" or being more important than anything else. What we call a "world" and "reality" arises out of the process of emphasizing certain objects of perception and putting others into the background, our sense of each object of perception fitting conceptually into a systemic whole, our intuitive ability to know where the "importance" and "emphasis" ought be in our world of perception. Out of this experience we form our world and can interact with it in a meaningful way, and our world makes sense to us, and is comprehensible. Our world is not "objective" in the sense that our conception of it issues directly from our bare perceptions, but rather our world arises out of the process of choosing what to emphasize, understanding what is related to what, and how each individual perception fits into a systemic whole. Each perception, "in itself", is disconnected from every other; and so what we call our "objective world" arises out of the very subjective, culturally and personally bound ways of connecting those perceptions in a meaningful way.

This sort of "sorting" through different daily perceptions, to put them in the context of all the life’s perceptions, and all the individual’s beliefs and important associations, is a possible function of dreams. Dreams often are loosely associated with the experiences of the day previous, though they often go beyond these experiences, possibly by unconscious associations with past experiences, and present imagery to us such that it does not make sense to us. But they are not giving us "messages" from our unconscious in the sense that, in order for them to function, we need to consciously understand them. While human beings will become psychotic if not allowed to dream for long enough, those that do dream but never remember their dreams, are not in any way affected by not discovering any "message" from their dreams. Their dreams perform their proper function just the same, whether they know what they mean or not.

It is a possible hypothesis that dreams are a means of, after taking in daily experiences, assimilating them into the context of the personality—the context of all past experiences and present emotional makeup—with a language of symbolism that the unconscious mind uses to process different ideas and associations.

Dreams must be more than a "window" into what we unconsciously associate with what, what we unconsciously believe and desire. In fact, the very phenomenon of remembering our dreams seems a sort of side effect of the function of dreams themselves, and nature certainly hasn’t provided us with a clear picture of even the dreams we remember. If dreams are a means of processing our waking life, and if we lose the ability to create a world that is sensible in the context of our lives and consciousness if denied time to dream, it makes sense that we would need a given amount of sleeping hours for a given amount of waking hours in order to function mentally.

Often times, when someone sees a frightening horror movie, that night’s dreams involve images and situations from that movie. If a horror movie has particularly frightened us, we would need to mentally assimilate the images in a way that would put them in a sensible context with the rest of our life. So it makes sense, in the terms of this chapter, that dreams would often involve a daily experience like watching a movie that particularly frightened us. If the movie were perfectly ordinary, and did not have any specific effect on our psychology that stood out, it would not need to be assimilated any more than any other daily experience. And while all daily experience needs assimilation, dreams would not particularly focus on the movie, but would merely put the day’s experience into the context of the past by going over associations the experiences of the day had with all that has led up to it.

This may be the way the mind "decides" which psychological associations are particularly relevant to the individual, which objects of perception in any given future experience need to be emphasized—and which "tuned out"—and what meaning and significance different sorts of future events and gestures will have to consciousness. In this way, consciousness is prepared naturally to experience things like a cocktail party without being "lost" in a world of perception—fifty different people talking, gestures seen here and here, words caught and heard in different conversations, etc. Also in this way we learn to tell when people are joking, and what is meant by words that cannot be told by the meanings of the words themselves. We learn what significance events in the news will have to us, what experiences signify danger or inappropriateness, what sorts of behavior in others we ought to condemn, and what sorts of daily experiences can be considered "random" and devoid of any special significance or the need for explanation. We learn, in short, how all of our perceptions form a systemic whole, how they are all related, and this is our means for being prepared for future perceptions, and interpreting them in terms of this whole. The mind, every night, has processed every day’s experiences and assimilated them into a vast, systemic organization of tens of thousands of different experiences that without such organization would remain each completely unrelated to any other. Thus, out of tens of thousands of experiences that may not have a purely logical relation to one another, is formed our experience of a world and reality that makes sense to us. In this way, we are better prepared for future experiences, with the ability to tell what they mean in such context, in a way similar to the way that the context of a conceptual framework can tell scientists what a particular datum means.

This hypothesis is a possible explanation for the fact that, if someone is awake for too long, and not able to assimilate experience with dreams, a meaningful interpretation of daily perceptions will become impossible; and if the deprivation goes on long enough, psychosis will result.

About two years ago, I began to learn to play the Chinese game of strategy called, in English, "Go". I often had in the first few months of learning to play, and still have after a day of playing several games, dreams about nothing but looking at a Go board, with pieces in various places, sometimes moves being made. In the context of this analysis, these dreams would represent my mind assimilating the various sequences of moves of the game I played that day, into the context of all my past experience of the game.

One can play two games of Go a day, for twenty years, and if one continues to play (and has the intellectual capacity) one will continue to get better. Thus, in the context of Go enthusiasts at large, I am still very much a beginner. Part of the reason Go is such a difficult game to master is that numbers in the trillions are only a fraction of different combinations of moves that can make up the combination of a particular game. A given organization of the pieces on the board will make the "best move" completely different with just one variation in the positions of the pieces. Thus, to become good at Go, one needs to be able to base one’s moves on the situation at hand, and not only past experiences of playing the game. Since the brain naturally bases its analysis of a given perceptual experience in the context of all past experiences, this is very difficult. Thus, the unusual number of dreams I have had of looking at a Go board might represent the natural difficulty my mind has at assimilating the game into my consciousness. My unconscious is given a kind of puzzle with each new game I play, since the situation in each game is particular to it. Every new game gives it difficulty in putting it in a meaningful context with past ones, as it looks for connections and patterns that will aid me in the future.

In the context of the present analysis, schizophrenia is a systemic inability to assimilate daily experiences in the context of the entire life, so that a "world" and "reality" can be experienced by consciousness. A schizophrenic, in a cocktail party, will not be able to "tune out" the other conversations and focus on the one he is involved in. He will be conscious of a gesture by a man in a conversation across the room, a word heard from a woman twelve feet from him. If his brain and system has been unable, through dreams (in my hypothesis), to put each day’s experiences, since infancy, into the context and organization of the totality of experiences, each will seem unrelated to every other. And thus, his subjective fantasies will be the determining mechanism to tell him what his experiences mean, and he will be left to speculate wildly on the meaning of his experiences and the nature of his world, since he cannot put everything into a coherent whole as a healthy mind is able to.

Schizophrenia becomes evident and diagnosable in individuals most often in late adolescence. This is just the time when the mind is beginning to complete its "construction" of the world, using all the experiences that have led up to it. The individual is no longer a child who is still learning what the world means, what associations are relevant to him, what perceptions he must learn to emphasize, what in his experience is "valuable" and what to despise. While certain indications of schizophrenia may be evident childhood, it makes sense that full-blown schizophrenia tends to become most evident just when the mind must put all its experiences into the formation of an entire world, and begin, rather than forming a world, to live and be an agent in it. If the mind is unable to form a world out of its experience, this would be more evident in the finished product (consciousness in adolescence) than in the developing stages of world formation (childhood).