Dream Fusion Lab

Origin. No identifiable source. Related to bisociation (Koestler) and the hypnagogic-imagery tradition.

Mechanism. Combines two incompatible aspirations without resolving the incompatibility, on the premise that the constraint forcing them apart is often the thing worth attacking.

Procedure. State two desirable properties that are held to be mutually exclusive. Refuse the trade-off. Ask what would have to be true for both to hold. That condition, not the fusion, is the output.

Applies to. Trade-offs asserted by convention rather than derived from a bound.

Limitations. Where the trade-off follows from a conservation law, an information-theoretic bound, or an impossibility theorem, refusing it is not creative. Determine which kind of trade-off is present before running this.