Taking an eclectic and evolutionary approach to signs, this text sees the sign as a fundamental part of human development. It offers integrative models of semiosis that utilize both American and European approaches to explore dreams, numbering signs, mythic narrative, and new signs. As signifying creatures, we fear the false creation "signifying nothing" because, like Macbeth, we think of them as daggers of the mind that raise questions about the reality of our signs, about signs as tools of creation and power, about the dark terrors (and lighter joys) that exist in human desire, and about the signs and the mind. This text looks at the daggers of the mind to argue that signs are in their basic structure ambivalent, joyfully perineal and eternally tricksters of the mind. They are, at base, generative things creating as much as they refer.

As signifying creatures, we fear the false creation 'signifying nothing' because, like Macbeth, we think of them as daggers of the mind that raise questions about the reality of our signs, about signs as tools of creation and power, about the dark terrors (and lighter joys) that exist in human desire, and about the signs and the mind. This text argues that signs are, at base, generative things creating as much as they refer.