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As the cognitive map designed in StorySpace is a map of the structure of the novel as an assemblage of the creative output of Jackson and her sources, critical as well as poetical/fictional, using the nineteenth century paradigm of phrenology as a metaphor for human psychology - specifically the narrator's - she demonstrates the concept, well known from Jung and Joyce, that the individual psyche is a hodgepodge of characters, that is seen most often in dreams and poetry, myth and religion. All these characters are also the realms of consciousness we in each inhabit from time to time, slipping in and out, seemingly at random.
If looked at as characters, it is only natural to view one's self as an artificial construct of numerous other beings, as our bodies are built of the biologically reassembled remains of parts of everything that has gone before - from last nights salad to a whiff of smoke from the crematoria. Thus the creature (literally creation) is at once the narrator; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's creation (as well as its bride); and the work of literature itself.
In the middle of this is "sleep": The center from which all undifferentiated dreams arise. "Sleep" is surrounded by the parts of the story we know from the cognitive map, but it is the blessed heart of the dream, from which we must all awake, and take on our daily lives. This is where we shall begin our exploration of the text.