  Storytelling is fundamental to language, including culture, conversation and
communication in their broadest senses. It thus emerges as an essential
component of intelligent systems, including systems where natural language is
not a primary focus or where we do not usually think of a story being involved.
In this paper we explore the emergence of storytelling as a requirement in
embodied conversational agents, including its role in educational and health
interventions, as well as in a general-purpose computer interface for people
with disabilities or other constraints that prevent the use of traditional
keyboard and speech interfaces. We further present a characterization of
storytelling as an inventive fleshing out of detail according to a particular
personal perspective, and propose the DREAMT model to focus attention on the
different layers that need to be present in a character-driven storytelling
system. Most if not all aspects of the DREAMT model have arisen from or been
explored in some aspect of our implemented research systems, but currently only
at a primitive and relatively unintegrated level. However, this experience
leads us to formalize and elaborate the DREAMT model mnemonically as follows: -
Description/Dialogue/Definition/Denotation - Realization/Representation/Role -
Explanation/Education/Entertainment - Actualization/Activation -
Motivation/Modelling - Topicalization/Transformation
