kilham: yes, thank you for adding the extra clarification, and sharing your experiences--always interesting to read about. I'm not sure why dream characters offer the answers they do. Maybe it's part expectation of complex human nature, and part difficulty in creating characters with enough sentience.

Nailler: not yet, but I plan to. And the next part I'm about to say goes to you, too, kilham. I think everything in the dream is made of the same "material." By that, I mean they all originate from a source before they become the sky, a tree, or a character. Their seeming sentience probably shares a single origin as well. Since you can "grant" sentience to objects and talk to them, maybe you're not communicating with a singular thing, but an expression of that same origin. This is why I think characters aren't really sentient, they just give us that impression. What's truly sentient, is the source they're an expression of: the subconscious. Again, I don't know any of this yet, just working on the idea.

So, if everything is an expression of that same intelligence, you could use anything to communicate with it. My idea is to try and use a book that might be like an encyclopedia of my mind, and I can browse its pages for the answers I'm looking for. I think this method might be more concise and less cryptic. I think part of this relies on expectation. We expect people to be complex, and so that's how they manifest. Like how we expect the sky to be blue, and so it is, even though there's no reason it should be in a dream, right? So we expect a book to be concise and clear in its answers, and that's how it should manifest. If this approach works, I'll be able to see what answers I can learn from it.