# 138 explained — Beyond Good and Evil

> Chapter companion for Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.

## What happens

The narrator draws a direct parallel between dreaming and waking life, asserting that in both states we invent and imagine the people we interact with, and then immediately forget this act of creation.

## Themes in this chapter

### Psychology as the Fundamental Science

The excerpt is a psychological claim about the universal process of invention and forgetting in human interaction, treating psychology as the basis for understanding social reality.

### Perspectivism

Implies that our experience of others is not an encounter with an objective reality but is always an act of imaginative construction from our own perspective.

## Character check-ins

### The Narrator

Presents a psychological observation about the invented nature of all social intercourse, positioning himself as an analyst of human perception.

## Key lines

> We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse⁠—and forget it immediately.

In both waking life and dreams, we creatively construct the personas of those we engage with and then promptly forget we have done so.

_Highlights the fundamental act of creation underlying all social perception and its subsequent repression._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/beyond_good_and_evil_se/chapters/138
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/beyond_good_and_evil_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/beyond_good_and_evil_se/chapters