The Private Worlds of the MindnOn the morning of July 13, 1985, as I noted in mynjournal, I woke with an exceptionally clear recollectionnof a dream. In it my wife, Elizabeth, and I were in anhigh-ceilinged Victorian room with brown walls fashioned ofnrotating metallic discs. From there, we moved outside ontonNew York City’s Park Avenue, where a group of elderly mennwere gathered for what seemed to be a parade. However, inna minute, most of them moved away. Elizabeth and Inremained there, atop a steep hill, looking down on 34thnStreet and other city streets below. Up the- hill (was itnMurray Hill, which I remembered from a visit to the oldnMurray Hill Hotel in 1946?) marched a company of soldiersnin World War I uniforms. They wore bright green sashesnacross their chests in the manner of certain Civil Warnregiments. We had a panoramic view of what appeared to benthe old Pennsylvania Railroad Station, which I was familiarnwith in my youth. The railroad station and the cityscapenwere bathed in an eerie green light. There was snow on thenground.nThis is one type of private world — a fantasy world — thatneveryone knows at one time or another. From birth to death,nwe are constantly shaping and reshaping our visions of thenworld, creating worlds inside our heads. We do this even asnwe proceed with our normal daily activities, in a purposefulnfashioning of an overall image of the various worlds thatnAnthony Harrigan is the former president of the UnitednStates Business and Industrial Council, in Washington,nD.C.n26/CHRONICLESnby Anthony Harrigannnnconfront us or impinge on us, in daydreams and reveries, inndreams at night and in memory.nLoren Eiseley describes the power behind the cosmos thisnway: “It makes in fact all of the innumerable and privatenworlds which exist in the minds of men.” All too often wenignore these private worlds, which all of us know, and thinknonly of the shared public world. The real world is alwaysnwith us, to be sure, but it is subjected to private interpretationnand conceptualization. Indeed, the real world is differentnfor everyone. Consider the world of human relationships.nThey can’t be fully described in any objective waynapart from the observer. The relationship of parent to child,nchild to parent, family members each to the other, friends tonfriends, and stranger to stranger are rarely identical. Thenindividual sees every other human being in a special context;neach individual exists in his and others’ frameworks ofnrelationships or, in some cases, becomes virtually invisible.nRelationships aren’t necessarily reciprocal or equal.nOne of the strangest capacities of the human being is hisnability in dreams to put real people in situations that arenfictional, utilizing their known characters while giving themnapplications that have nothing to do with their real lives, asnin the case of a dream I had that involved two good friendsnfrom different parts of the country and different socialnwodds. It was an intelligence-caper type situation in NazioccupiednEurope. Pondering this sort of thing, one is boundnto ask: what led to this peculiar dream scenario, which hadnnothing to do with the real life experiences of the individualsninvolved, even though they looked and acted in ways thatn