The Dreams concept was inspired by a port to Forth that I made of a Lisp Flavors and Closures package [Ric87] written by Pete Ohler of Boulder Creek, California. This Closures package was written in muLISP-87. The muLISP package was itself ported from the dynamic Closures package for the Lisp Machine project at MIT. Because of the unique syntactic and semantic nature of Forth, the closures package was not initially a good match to Forth, but after numerous changes were made as experience was gained working with the Forth closures package, the metaphor of a dream was conceived. With a consistent metaphor to guide the design of a new but similar package, a good match to the style of Forth was obtained. I would like to thank Pete Ohler for providing the inspiration for Dreams.
I want to thank Gregory Ilg for providing a sounding board during the evolution of the Dreams system. He was the first test case for any metaphorical innovations, and he shot holes in many of them.
I would like to thank the following people who read the drafts of this paper and offered many suggestions and corrections: Scott Isemenger, Kevin McArthur, Trish Renner, Ron Strausser, and Scott Thompson. I especially want to thank my wife Darlene Brown for proof reading the drafts of this paper many times.
I would like to thank the referees for their careful reading of this paper, and their many suggestions for its improvement. This is a better paper because of them. Nevertheless, all errors must be my own.