The vernacular writer of The Dream of the Rood conceptualises the human mind, and its ability to apprehend textual representations of dream images and imaginary worlds of scintillating animated crosses, in distinctive ways that are at least partially available to us today. Without some access, not only to those concepts, but also to common human mental functions for processing the text, we would not be able to make sense of these lines, nor have an emotional, intellectual, or aesthetic reaction to them. We would not be able to appreciate and synthesise, for example, the Christian cultural references, the generic dream vision features, or the poetic counterpoint of silent people (‘reordberend’, speech-bearers) and a speaking cross, let alone the conceptual metaphor of time as space, whereby a night can have a middle. Our very ability to create a coherent response to the text relies on our appreciation of both culturally and individually specific aspects of the inner life embedded in the text, but also requires us to deploy universal human cognitive functions that have changed very little, if any, in the thousand-odd years since the poem was written down in the Vercelli Book.