Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge.