Can a story change how you think?

The short answer: a story is the only thing that reliably changes how a person thinks, because it is the only thing that gets past the part of you that argues. Facts change what you believe, sometimes. A story changes what you can picture, and you cannot think a thought you cannot picture.

This sounds like a claim for literature. It is a claim about how minds work, and anybody who has been changed by a book already knows it is true.

Why arguments mostly fail

When somebody tells you a thing, you check it. That is what the arguing part of you is for, and it is good at its job. It compares the new claim to what you already believe, and if they do not match, the new claim loses. This is why people are so rarely persuaded by evidence of things they do not want to be true.

An argument knocks on the front door. The house is defended.

Why a story gets in

A story does not make a claim. It shows you a person in a situation and lets you be them for a while. The arguing part of you stands down, because nothing is being asserted; you are just watching. And while it stands down, you live through something you have not lived through, and come out the other side having had an experience that is now, in a small way, yours.

Afterwards, you can picture something you could not picture before. A different way of being in a marriage. A way of facing a thing you have been avoiding. A kind of person you had not met. Once it is picturable, it is thinkable, and once it is thinkable it is available to you in your own life.

Nobody persuaded you. You were simply somewhere, and you remember it.

The teacher who does not explain

The books that change people are nearly always the ones that refuse to tell you what they mean. A story that explains itself is an argument in a costume, and the front door closes again.

The ones that work leave you with the experience and no instructions. You have to do the understanding yourself, which is slower, and which is exactly why it stays. An understanding you were handed is information. The same understanding arrived at is a change.

What changes, exactly

Not your opinions, usually. Something underneath them: what you expect of people, what you believe is survivable, what you think a life can contain. Those are the settings that opinions grow out of, and they are almost impossible to reach any other way.

A person who has lived inside the right story at the right time is not the same afterwards, and often cannot say why. They just find that a door they used to walk past is open.

Where this is in the book

The Returning Dream is the first scene of chapter six. It opens on a line about dreams: that some do not tell you where you are going, they just make sure you will recognise it when you get there. That is also what the book thinks a story is for, and the scene is the one where its own story begins to turn into something the man inside it can recognise.