When we want to communicate something spatially complex, like a spiral staircase, it is easier to draw it in the air or on paper than to define it in words. In the same way, ideas and experiences that are temporally or intellectually complex often can be understood more clearly from diagrams or maps than from verbal descriptions.

In many societies, dreams are mapped or diagrammed rather than narrated. I've juxtaposed some of these ‘dream maps’ with examples from our own society and three of Freud's schematic representations of dynamic psychic states.