I've always referred to this little gem as the "What the fuck was *that* all about?" propheet.
From what I remember about the weird vagueness of that experience, there was one thing that I feel was the crux of The Dreams' message.
Your identity is evil.
IMO, one of the reasons this propheet is so confusing is that, aside from the imagine, it deviates in formula. Normally, the "major" exercise is done the next day. However, in the Dreams, the truly bizarre stuff happens at night. The result of this is that the exercise which is done the next day seems anticlimactic... especially since you are still rather stale and confused from the night before. (This happens in every propheet, but the Dreams' day exercise doesn't produce enough euphoria to counteract last night's damage.)
Why do I feel that the night exercises had more of an impact than those of the following day?
Think about it. What did we do the next day? We cried about when our dream died. That was it. It was as tame as the truth in terms of intensity and complexity. In addition, several students, including myself, were confused by the premise because we had not yet determined what our dream was in the first place. That exercise comes later. At the end, I chose randomly, since I really had no idea.
Pretty mild, right?
So, what did we do that night? Well, the one single night exercise that I remember made the dead-dream cryfest the next day seem rather wimpy. That was of the nightmare drawings. Does anyone remember how long we had to kneel in front of our chairs and look at our hideous self-portraits? Portraits which painted ourselves outside the CEDU ideology as nighmares, monsters, death? It seemed like hours. We had to sit and draw ourselves in the most hideous way possible, depicting what we were like before coming to CEDU. Then we had to mill around and look at everyone else's artistic examples of warped self-image. Then we had to sit and look at our own, trying to stay awake. Every time your eyes drooped down from sleepyness, and you snapped them back open, you had *that* monstrosity staring at you.
This is why I feel that this propheet did a lot more damage than most students thought at the time. Most of us from my time, myself included, just kind of dismissed the Dreams after a while as some sort of nonsequitor hiccup in an otherwise flawless, or at least pretty good, program. (Although I knew a few who swore by the Dreams, and it was their favorite propheet. Although they were in the minority.) The Dreams is really the first time you fully commit, (in black crayon) to perceiving yourself the same way CEDU did, and you officially renounce your previous self.
Quest is a family of betrayal. In the Brother's, you learn how to betray your friends, in the Dreams, you learn how to betray yourself.
