in; someone threw a pencil at you; you were in the back of a big car with your grandmother,

on the way to sit an exam; you had to climb over a wall but kept being tickled by a giant

squirrel. Then you woke up. It felt immensely important, but when you go downstairs and

try to tell your companions about the extraordinary things that travelled through your sleeping

brain, the results are sobering. You keep saying that it felt "exciting", "so

weird" and "absolutely amazing" , but – strangely – your attempts to get others

to experience the particularities of your night are met by some dispiritingly blank

stares. Half-way through the narration, someone pipes up to say the cereal is running low.

Another person mentions it might rain later. Then the doorbell rings. It's a poignant

impasse, but not an untypical one either. It's tempting to think the problem has to

do with dreams themselves – because they are so odd, unique and specific to us. But

the difficulty isn't limited to dreams: it's a general problem of existence, which

can just as well strike when we try to explain how our holiday was, what we feel about our

childhood or our ideas about how society should be run. Much about our lives is like a very

intensely-felt dream we can’t quite get others to listen to properly. The reason is

to a striking extent down to a collective lack of preparation, an insufficient sense

that what we’re trying to do is really very hard and therefore will require a high degree

of skill and practice. We naively assume that enthusiasm and authenticity can be enough;

and that if we feel something to be important or beautiful, it will inevitably and immediately

strike others as being so as well. This charming, though ultimately lonely, egocentricity can

be best seen in children who are among the worst story tellers, because they have a touchingly

weak hold on a very painful idea: that other people are liable to be in different places

from us internally and are highly unlikely to understand, feel and see as we do unless

we go to considerable lengths to extract, arrange and systematically package up the

contents of our minds for them. These are some of the rules for storytelling: – firstly,

we know what we mean far earlier than anyone else can and so we must understand a story

at least five times as well when it is to be shared in company as when it is merely

left to marinade in our own brains. – secondly, keeping a story brief takes far more effort

than letting it expand. The philosopher Pascal once touchingly apologised to a friend for

the length of a letter he had written him. As he admitted, "I'm sorry I didn't

have time to make it shorter." – Thirdly, we need to simplify. The downfall of almost

all anecdotes is an accumulation of incidental detail untethered to the underlying logic

of the story. If one is explaining how it felt to see one's grandmother, it is irrelevant

(and a waste of someone else's rather precious life) to say what time one left the house

and what the weather happened to be like. We need a view of the branches, not of every

leaf. – fourthly, factual events (dates, times, actions) are always less interesting

(though far easier to remember) than feelings – and yet it's the feelings that invariably

contain the kernel of what can intrigue others. It's how we feel about what happened, not

merely what happened, that counts.

Those who grow up to speak clearly are those especially alive to the risk and the tragedy

of being misunderstood. The contents of our minds, and even of our dreams, are never really

too strange or boring for others to understand: it's just that our culture hasn't yet

taken seriously enough the bracing challenges of narrating the real substance of our complex

days and nights to other people.

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