There is a brief, unsettling moment when you wake up from a dream and still don’t know who you’re meant to be. Both the wakeful and dream worlds are equally true in that liminal space. The pillow you’re holding and the lover who just left your arms have the same ontological weight. No less real than the room gradually forming around your conscious body is the city you were traversing in the dream, with its unique light and air texture. We write this off as confusion, a momentary glitch in consciousness as it boots back into configuration. However, what if we’re ignoring the point at which we’re most truthful about the nature of reality itself? In my entire life, I have never fallen in love or shared the intimacies of a long-term relationship with another person. I have never been so close to someone that their thoughts and every mannerism become so predictable to me while still cherished. I understand abstractly when people talk about their love life and experiences falling in love, although I haven’t had that experience myself. I have never even slept with… oh wait, there was that one time. Yet, on this particular night, I spent a lifetime between the period of slumber and dawn.

In a dream, I was with a woman whose face I can no longer recall, even though, within the dream, it was no less familiar to me than my own. Every gesture and every incomplete sentence that didn’t need to be finished made it obvious that we were not new to one another. She was my mate, and even though decades seemed to exist in the space between us, I was still in love: utterly, completely. It was an overwhelming sense of joyful contentment, an inexplicable happiness in sharing life with this person. The sediments of our shared existence ran layer upon layer with memories and plenty of laughter. I knew her – the exact height she liked to raise her hair before morning routine; the perfect quantity of cream she enjoyed with her tea – yuck, I thought this was disgusting in the dream, but she was darlingly the kind of weirdo that took tea with cream; the sigh that indicated she was anxious or at ease; her carefree walk through our home – our home – with the unconscious grace of belonging. We had kids. Our inside jokes were worn out, and we often laughed, not at the jokes, but at the fact that they weren’t funny anymore. Our love was tried and tested; we weren’t just together or just a couple – we still cared deeply about each other, while at the same time settling our affection into something basic and unremarkable as breathing, no longer desperate to show itself. She asked me to get something from the next room. I can’t remember what, but it was a banal request, the kind that is made a thousand times in a real marriage. As I stood to get the item, something fell from the table in front of me with a thud. And I woke up.

The grief was immediate and devastating. I tried to will myself back to her as I lay there in bed, but dreams don’t work that way. My home was gone. My primary family and children were gone. My mate – she was gone. Or rather, I was gone from her. Abruptly and suddenly vaporized from her world. I started to mourn. Mourning a person I couldn’t even picture and aching for a home that never really existed in any demonstrable way. Days, weeks, and even now, as I write these words with a tear, I still carry the loss like a phantom limb – bearing the absence of something that never happened. Or did it? What if it were real? What if she’s still there in that ongoing dream, wondering where I went? From her point of view, did I simply disappear mid-stride; there one second, and not there the next? Is she grieving, too, in whatever reality it is that dreams occupy? These questions, which I first began pondering in the gloomy limbo of that night’s thought, still haunt me today with their implications. We wake up every morning to the “real world”, like people stepping back across a border from shadowland. However, what if our departure from these surreal places isn’t their dissipation from existence but rather more akin to us simply… leaving?

i. Tug of the present
There is an innate unease in how we awaken from dreams. We don’t get to decide when we arrive or leave. We are simply expelled from the nightmare, mundane life, or moments of bliss. Upon waking, we often feel disoriented as our minds work frantically to adjust to the reality around us. Driven by the responsibilities of our waking lives, we quickly shake off the enchantment of the dream world and reorient ourselves to the present moment. We wash away the drowse like water after a swim, convinced that those vivid landscapes we saw and the urgent voices have faded into the depths of our unconscious. We believe their existence relied on us, that we were not merely guests but the very foundation that upheld that reality. However, consider the phenomenology of an actual dream state. When we dream, we see ourselves as participants in that reality rather than creators of it. In fact, often in dreams we are bystanders – watching events unfold that clearly have their own momentum and encountering people deep in their own concerns.

The dream world has its own continuity, logic, and cast of characters who seem to have pasts and ongoing engagements that predate our arrival. There is the stranger who hurriedly asks for directions, another leisurely waving at a ship, ourselves a face in a crowd watching some drama play out that has nothing to do with us, our home residence that feels both new and familiar at the same time, the childhood home with rooms we have never seen before, and the city that feels both foreign and well known. We don’t experience these as creations in our dreams, but as mainstays and discoveries. When we wake up, do all these elaborate worlds and histories that were doing just fine without us summarily collapse like quantum wave functions, only existing when we are present to observe them? Or do we merely lose access to these places, like a radio losing a station when tuned to a different frequency; our departure as inconsequential to those worlds as someone leaving a room at a party?

ii. Cross-pollination
Among the more remarkable indications that dream worlds might have their own reality is what we occasionally bring back with us across the void. In my dreams, I’ve heard whole songs with unfamiliar lyrics. I’ve gotten out of bed to hum the uncanny tunes into my phone before they vanish like mist in the morning. Where does this music come from? Who are its composers? If dreams were solely the result of neurons randomly firing to rearrange everyday experiences, how then do we explain these completely original creations from other worlds? Beyond music and ordinary dream narratives, many of us have found ourselves experiencing fully realized films or immersive games while dreaming – complete with coherent plots, consistent aesthetics, even innovative mechanics we’ve never encountered in waking life. These aren’t fragmentary or chaotic; they’re polished productions that leave us wishing for some dream recorder to capture them for replay. Such experiences suggest we’re not creating but witnessing, not imagining but attending performances that exist independent of our observation.

It is well known that Paul McCartney woke up with the entire melody to “Yesterday” in his head. The song was so flawless and complete that McCartney spent weeks asking friends and other musicians if he had inadvertently copied it from another artist. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was inspired by a vivid dream, as were many of Salvador Dalí’s paintings. Although debated, Mendeleev is said to have conceived the idea of the periodic table in a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson attributed the storyline for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” to his so-called “brownies,” the dream-beings who performed plays for him while he slept. These aren’t merely inspirations, but clearly a form of transmission. It’s as though these artists and writers function as conduits between various worlds, bringing back with them fragments of other realities’ creative output, much like bees collect pollen from flower to flower. The dream world offers us its many aesthetics, arts, sciences, and stories. We awaken holding these treasures and striving frantically to transcribe them before they slip away. Therefore, if we can bring back these ideas, harmonies, and innovations from dreams, doesn’t that suggest they originate somewhere? Doesn’t it show that their existence was independent of this world and our materialization of that dream? A song has to be playing somewhere for us to hear it, even in dreams. This would explain why dream-sourced creativity often feels more like a discovery rather than an invention.

iii. Self
In dreams, we are often someone else – not in the sense of transformation but in the sense of always having been that person. We know things we don’t know. We speak languages we never learned. We carry histories that aren’t ours. These dream selves feel no less authentic than our waking selves; they simply operate under different parameters. This multiplicity of being raises interesting questions about identity and responsibility. If we are equally ourselves in dreams – if those experiences are equally real – then what about the choices we make there? The passions we have, the promises we break, the violence we sometimes enact or endure? Sure, we can excuse our dream behavior by saying we weren’t really ourselves, but those very dreams suggest something less tidily accounted for: that we are always all of our possible selves, and waking life is simply the self that remains trapped in consequences.

iv. Ontological chauvinism
It is easy, even pragmatic, to readily crown our waking state as the one true reality, the standard against which all other states of consciousness must be measured and found wanting. We might cite the consistency of physical laws, the shared experiences with others, the persistent narrative thread that connects one waking day to the next. But aren’t these simply the rules of this particular reality, no more universally valid than the fluid physics of the dream world? Fluid, seemingly, in our wakeful state, but perfectly natural during our immersion in dreams. Within a dream, cause and effect operate according to their own principles. We accept impossible architectures without question. Childhood homes open onto foreign cities. The dead are mingled with the living. Time moves in circles and spirals rather than straight lines. Identity is fluid – we can be ourselves and simultaneously observe ourselves, or shift between multiple perspectives without confusion. These aren’t failures of logic but alternative logics, different ways reality might organize itself. Most often, the dream doesn’t know it’s a dream. More precisely, the dreaming consciousness doesn’t experience itself as dreaming but as simply being. It’s only from the vantage point of waking that we retroactively label the experience as “unreal.” But this judgment comes from outside the system, like a fish declaring that life on land is impossible while never having left the water.

Yet the dream’s relationship with its own nature also reveals surprising sophistication. In lucid dreams, consciousness can know it’s dreaming while remaining fully present in that reality. The dream accommodates this self-awareness without collapsing, as if meta-consciousness were simply another feature it can enable or disable. You can know you’re dreaming and still feel the dream-rain on your skin, still navigate dream-spaces with full presence, or converse with other dream-beings about the fact that you are dreaming. You even gain agency – the ability to reshape, come and go as you choose, and explore with intention. The dream doesn’t dissolve under this scrutiny; it continues, undiminished. What could be more robust than a world able to withstand the knowledge of precisely what it is? These lucid states suggest dreams aren’t mere neural static but sophisticated realities that can include consciousness of their own nature without that consciousness deteriorating them. If dream-worlds can contain their own self-knowledge, if they can know what they are and continue undiminished, then perhaps the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is less about the nature of the reality itself and more about our willingness to grant it legitimacy.

v. Immigrants
What if consciousness isn’t contained but migratory? What if we are not creators but translators, moving between realities and carrying seeds from one to another? The screenwriter who wakes with a fully-formed plot, the composer who hears an otherworldly symphony, the scientist who sees the solution to an impossible equation floating in dream space – these aren’t generating something from nothing. They’re smuggling artifacts across borders. But perhaps the exchange is even more profound. Perhaps we don’t just carry solutions – we take our questions to wherever they’re most likely to find answers. The mathematician struggling with a proof in waking life enters the dream world, where spatial relationships operate differently and logic bends in ways that suddenly make the impossible obvious. The composer searching for a refrain finds it in a realm where sound and emotion are more directly linked, where music needs no translation from feeling. We migrate not only randomly but occasionally purposefully, our unconscious sifting through realities for the physics that best suits our query. This would explain why certain problems that torment us for weeks in waking life resolve instantly in dreams. It’s not that our brain is secretly working in the background – it’s that we’ve taken the problem to a universe with different rules, like carrying an equation from base-10 to base-8 and watching it suddenly balance.

A good example of this would be the anecdote about Kekulé devising the structure of benzene while dozing, watching atoms dance into a snake eating its tail. The dream world’s non-linear causality, its fluid identity boundaries, its willingness to let contradictions coexist – these aren’t bugs but features, alternative logical systems that make certain truths visible that our lone and rigid waking physics obscures. Just as a bee doesn’t create the pollen but transfers it, enabling new growth in distant gardens, perhaps we carry ideas, chants, and stories between worlds. This exchange enriches both realities. Our dreams incorporate the physics and faces of waking life; our waking life receives the impossible architectures and revolutionary insights of dreams. The artist wakes knowing they’ve encountered something that already existed, fully formed. They become archaeologists of sleep, excavating rather than constructing. The frantic urgency to record, to write, to capture before it fades – this isn’t the urgency of creation but of preservation, of trying to save something precious that belongs to another world before it evaporates. We are consciousness in motion, seeking the perfect configuration of reality to illuminate each mystery, assembling our understanding from fragments gathered across multiple worlds.

vi. Built-in Memory
Dreams reveal memory as sculptor rather than archivist. In dreams, we remember things that never quite happened during our period in that particular dream – these aren’t imaginations but memories that arrive complete, fitting perfectly within the dream’s logic. We know the layout of houses we’ve never entered, the faces of friends we’ve never met. These implanted memories feel identical to real ones because, perhaps, all memories are constructions – stories we accede about a past that exists now only as neural patterns and electrical ghosts haunting the present. There’s a recurring dream where I discover a room in my apartment I’d forgotten existed. It’s always been there, behind a door I simply never noticed. The room is fully furnished, covered in dust, waiting. In the dream, I’m overwhelmed not by surprise but by recognition – of course this room exists; how could I have forgotten?

In another recurring dream, San Francisco contains a more nuanced geography. Behind the Embarcadero Building, a short distance southeast toward the bay, there’s a stunning waterfall cascading into a clear, surreal pond. The terrain is unexpectedly mountainous – peaks you’d never see from the city, hidden until you know exactly where to look. I’ve visited this spot so many times in dreams that I could walk you there blindfolded. It’s popular in that world: people bathe in the pond while others hike up to view the falls from above. Then there’s the floating island, hovering somewhere north of the city, just past where the Golden Gate Bridge would end. For some unknown reason in the dream, this place is undiscovered by anyone else in that world. I go to this hidden floating island, often by flight, to be alone or just look at the Bay from above. Occasionally, in the dream, I seem to bring others to the private spot to witness its beauty – the view of the entire Bay Area sparkling below is breathtaking – somehow, however, I’m the only one who knows the way there. In the logic of the dream, this makes perfect sense: of course there’s a floating island, of course I can go there anytime I feel like it. Each time I wake from these dreams, I check. The door isn’t there. San Francisco’s actual geography, while ever beautiful, remains stubbornly earthbound – no hidden waterfalls, no floating islands. But the checking of these places itself feels like an act of faith: faith in a reality where they exist. What if I simply haven’t looked in the right way? What if they exist in a frequency of reality I can only access while dreaming? Or what if my memory of these dreams’ recurrence is itself constructed – an implanted memory of repetition for places I’ve visited only once, or perhaps never at all?

When neuroscientists tell us that we reconstruct memories anew each time we recall them, that the act of remembering is also an act of reimagining, they’re telling us something dreams already know: that the boundary between memory and imagination is far more permeable than we acknowledge. In this light, the strange temporal logic of dreams – where we can remember a future that hasn’t happened, where causality runs backward and forward simultaneously – might be intentional design, not dissonance. It might be consciousness showing us its true relationship with time: not as a passenger on a one-way train but as an artist painting moments, connecting them not chronologically but aesthetically, emotionally, meaningfully.

vii. Continuity
“Does the dream continue without you?” This question transforms from whimsical speculation into something genuinely unsettling when we sit with its implications. Every night, we encounter dream-beings who react to us with their own apparent agency, their own concerns, their own destinations. We meet them mid-story, their lives already in progress, their histories preceding our arrival. When we wake – when our consciousness withdraws from that space – why should we assume their stories end? Consider the aria you heard in your dream, sung by a voice you’ve never encountered in waking life yet recognized completely. Does it continue after you vanish? Do the other listeners remain rapt in their seats while the performer, perhaps noting an empty chair or perhaps not, continues without missing a beat? The dream-poet whose words you desperately tried to memorize – are they still reciting to an audience that no longer includes you? That profound conversation with the dream-stranger that felt so urgent, so essential – are they still waiting for your response, or has your absence been absorbed as naturally as any other transition in that world?

Perhaps in the physics of dream-reality, sudden vanishing is unremarkable – no more surprising than a dropped call or a star’s twinkle interrupted by passing clouds. We know from our own dream experience how naturally we accept radical plot shifts, impossible scene changes, the sudden appearance or disappearance of people we know or have never known. If we, while dreaming, don’t question these fluid boundaries, why would the dream-beings find our departure noteworthy? This isn’t to make a metaphysical claim about the objective existence of dream worlds – though neither can we definitively deny it. Instead, it’s to recognize the presumption in our casual dismissal of these experiences. We’re so sure that consciousness creates reality rather than discovers it, that our presence animates rather than simply witnesses, that the entire production ceases when we exit the theater. But what if we’re wrong? What if right now, in countless dreams from last night, last year, last decade, the stories continue – indifferent to our absence, complete without our witness?

viii. Parallels
The parallel between our dream existence and our waking life is perhaps the most profound. We come and go from both. In sleep, we leave this world as surely as we leave the dream world upon waking. Our absence here is as complete as our absence there. The world continues its business – hearts beat, rivers flow, others dream their own dreams – while we’re elsewhere. If continuity without our presence is the mark of reality, then this world proves its reality every night when it persists despite our absence. But by that same logic, who’s to say the dream world doesn’t similarly persist? We can’t observe its continuity because we’re not there to witness it, but then again, we can’t observe this world’s continuity while we’re dreaming either. We take it on faith, on the reports of others, on the evidence of changed things when we return. And what of the songs that play in both worlds? The stories that bridge the gap? These are the proof of commerce between realities, the evidence that the boundary between dream and waking is very much porous and actively traversed. We are not sealed in one reality but moving between them, each night a journey out and each morning a return, our consciousness the ferry that carries cargo both ways.

ix. Living questions
Somewhere, in a dream I can no longer access, there might be a woman wondering why her husband never came back from the next room, or perhaps – if the phenomenon of inexplicable disappearing is natural in that world, similar to the passing and finality of death in this reality – she’s just wondering where the whimsical tidal waves of existence have washed him onto. Perhaps she tells friends about the day I vanished, how I stood up to get something from the next room and never returned. Years have passed since that dream, yet I still carry the weight of that other life. When I woke, the question that haunted me wasn’t whether that life was real, but what exactly we mean by “real” in the first place. If reality is measured by the intensity of experience, by the emotions evoked, by the way events imprint themselves on consciousness, then that dreamed life was as real as any other. I grieved its loss upon waking, just as one might grieve any life that slips away.

This is the heresy that dreams offer: that reality might not be singular but multiple, not objective but phenomenological. Every night, we slip into other streams of being, equally valid, equally vivid, distinguished from waking life only by their failure to persist and their resistance to being shared. I can no longer assert myself as never fallen in love because I’m genuinely certain I now know firsthand the deep feeling of intimate identification with another person so strongly that the distinction of individuality completely melts into a oneness of body and mind. That it lasted only a night in this world’s time leaves me with a paradox. In dream-time and dream-space, it spanned decades. I may never meet her again, or ever remember her features. I may never even know her. But I still can’t help but love and miss her; a ghost in my memories, completely elusive to my best attempts at reconstruction. Today, I occasionally add cream to my tea and wistfully sip it. Every time I do, I still think to myself with a warm glow in my heart, “yuck, this is definitely disgusting!”

x. Conclusion
Every morning, we practice resurrection. We are vagabonds of consciousness, returning from the unrestrained existence of dreams to what we call waking life, which, in the end, is simply the dream we’ve all agreed to have together. We return with dream-dirt still clinging to our souls, otherworldly melodies half-remembered on our tongues, the muscle memory of our other lives still warm in our bodies. We remember who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to believe about the nature of the real. We check our phones, that modern anchor to our shared reality, and allow the urgent to exile the possible. Yet, something persists. The dreams do fade, but they leave their fingerprints on our day, subtle alterations in how we see the world, what we notice and remember, what we’re willing to believe.

The world is dreamy, not because it lacks realism, but because it exceeds our capacity to definitively know its boundaries. Every reality might be a dream to some other reality. Every waking is also a falling asleep. Every love, whether lived in this world or another, leaves its mark on whatever remains of us when we cross between worlds. In this way, dreams might be less about sleep than about awakening – not to a single reality but to the gorgeous multiplicity of being conscious, the endless creativity of awareness itself. They remind us that every reality is, in the end, a kind of dream: a story consciousness tells itself about what it means to be. The question isn’t whether dreams are real. The question is whether we’re brave enough to admit that reality itself might be more dream-like than we dare imagine – multiple, mutable, and always, always stranger than we’re ready to accept.

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