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its inheritance, is in a state of advancing atrophy. This degeneracy, and the lack of a natural grammar of visual scene description, explain the fragmentation and apparent irrationality that typify our dreams. The characteristic amnesia for dreams is illusory, but also fundamental; it serves to disambiguate the lesson world from the lived world. Tøssentern believed that the obsession with symbolism in dream analysis was a mistake. The content of a dream was a portrayal of reality distorted by information loss and neural processing error, and its interpretation was consequently a problem of image restoration. In any event, much of the ancestral content (the earliest of which is characteristically nonverbal and non-graphical) no longer analogized coherently into a rapidly evolved human culture, and was further contaminated by recent, personal (and, of course, defective) dream invention.
    With one idea, Tøssentern provided a new ontology and a theory of phenomenology and semantic content for dreaming. He viewed symbolic theories as interesting but over-determined; they should be reconceptualized only as attempts to translate pre-lingual, disordered imagery into language, and be cleansed accordingly—particularly of mysticism. Using arguments that we cannot reproduce here, he also systematically dismissed other contemporary neuropsychological and neurocognitive theories, being especially (though politely) contemptuous of the idea that dreams are not actually or vestigially purposive but are epiphenomenal to a nightly clearing of memory, or even more fatuously, result from random nerve firing.
    Edvard Oliver Montague Tøssentern was born mid-Atlantic, aboard MV Okeanos en route to New York, on the night of 28 February, 1953. His mother, Henrietta (née Montague), was travelling to join her husband Henrik Tøssentern, who had sailed three months earlier to take up a professorship in mathematical logic. She was accompanied by thirteen-year-old Lucy from her previous marriage to the cellist Pierre Tiese, a union that was dissolved amicably in 1942. Edvard was to become deeplyattached to his stepsister, and her scandalous death in the Oriel Gardens affair of 1963 caused him permanent grief.
    Henrik Tøssentern had occupied, with equal facility, academic posts in musicology and mathematics in both Oslo and London. During the war he was active in a Norwegian Resistance cell devoted to signal interception and decryption. His contribution was noted by the British Admiralty, which drafted him to Bletchley Park in 1942. It was there that he met Henrietta, a linguist seconded from the Foreign Office, and they were married in 1945. The eponymous Tøssentern transform (referred to by him as K N transformation), now indispensable in quantum cryptography, belongs to Henrik.
    The family remained in the United States until Edvard was eight, moving then to Oslo, London, Paris and Oxford. While still at school in Paris, he published a paper on problems in the translation of subjective terms, illustrated extensively with the vocabulary of pain. His graduate studies were at Cambridge, which he made his lifelong home, and where he became a Fellow of Nazarene College.
    His home in Chaucer Road was famed for relaxed hospitality and a kind of informal, salon scholarship. It also housed an enviable library that expanded adventitiously into available living space; it is said that the mathematician Rodney Thwistle thought it imprudent to continue visiting as, room after room, ‘books displaced oxygen’. Nevertheless, the vitality somehow remained. In recent conversations, Tøssentern shared ideas that, typically, unified his interests. One was concerned with defining semantic coherence (he used the example of narrative sense) in terms of a suite of conserved properties (such as temporal, nominal and causal content). Another was an inductive graph-based approach to spatial reasoning and image analysis. One is tempted to speculate