Conflation is the mixing, confusion, blending, or substitution of qualities that takes place when two ideas are equally unknown. Take "dreams" and "death," the most famous examples. We don't know much about either, so the temptation is to think of one in terms of the other. Many if not most cultures think that death involves a kind of dream, and that dreams are one way the living can visit the Land of the Dead. Conflation is an important stable source of cultural ideas because it depends not on what humans can know, but on what they DON'T KNOW.