These three tests are intended for those learning to recognise and even control the direction of their dreams. Text is unstable in the envisioned unconscious, and either cannot be read or changes itself between breaths. Mechanical objects and light switches tend not to work, and physical laws—such as gravity—are undependable. For Neith, who routinely views considerable quantities of the recorded experience of other minds, the tests are both a practical reality check and an aid to being comfortable and familiar in her own skin at the end of the working day. She runs them directly after a session and at random through her waking life. It has to be a habit to work: if you only do it when you think you may be dreaming, you won’t do it when you are dreaming but believe that you are not. It’s easy enough to recognise the sleeping mind when you find yourself in flight after a champagne dinner with Claude Rains—although Neith does not often dream of flying, which bothers her because Freud insisted such dreams were about sex—but much harder when the deviation is more subtle or more plausible: unknown and undefinable flavours of fruit, vanishingly small worlds stacked with coincidence to the point of inevitability, the power to read menus in other languages or arm-wrestle a man twice your mass. The dream state is wily, and it learns as you do.