Are Dreams a Different World?
Oh, the places we go!
Many cultures throughout history have had wildly different interpretations of what their dreams meant. The aboriginals believed that those puzzling realms to which they traveled each night were realer than the ones in which they spent their waking hours. Ancient Egyptians believed that their dreams offered them a glimpse into the future. Many African tribes were of the belief that dreams would allow you to confer with ancestors and lost loved ones.
Whether dreams are another place, another time, or another realm entirely is something different cultures have debated since the dawn of civilization. As I’ve gotten older, it’s grown harder to shake the notion that, if nothing else, our dreams have meaning. But so often, dreams feel not just like valuable metaphors for life and the things we’re dealing with but travel of the soul.
Among the most inexplicable features of dreams are the locations in which we spend them. Within a given dream, you can slip seamlessly between different narratives in wildly different environments without so much as a clue. Oftentimes, these will be places from our waking life. But for most, it isn’t quite that simple.
Many people I’ve spoken with report that when they dream, they go, not to replicas of the places they’ve been in life, but to strange and…
