There is a moment, fleeting and transcendent, when you wake from a dream but haven’t yet remembered who you are supposed to be. In that liminal space, both worlds hold equal claim to truth. The lover who just left your arms exists with the same ontological weight as the pillow you’re clutching. The city you were navigating – its particular quality of light, the texture of its air – feels no less real than the room slowly assembling itself around your waking body. We dismiss this as confusion, a brief malfunction of consciousness as it boots back up into its proper configuration. But what if we’re dismissing the very moment when we’re most honest about the nature of reality itself?

I have never fallen in love in my entire life, have never shared the quiet intimacies of a long relationship, or learned another person’s rhythms so completely that their thoughts become predictable and precious. I understand abstractly when people describe their experience of falling in love with another person, but I’ve not quite experienced it firsthand. I haven’t even… oh wait, there was that one time. Yet, there was that night when I lived an entire lifetime in the space between sleep and dawn.

In the dream, I was with a woman whose face I cannot now conjure, though I knew it then as well as my own. We weren’t new to each other – that was clear in every gesture, every unfinished sentence that didn’t require completion. I was deeply in love. It was an extreme feeling of happy contentment; an inexplicable satisfaction being alive with this person. Decades seemed to live in the space between us, not as distance but as sediment, layer upon layer of shared existence. I knew the exact height she liked to raise her hair before morning routine, the perfect quantity of cream she enjoyed with her tea – yeah, she was the kind of weirdo that took tea with cream, the particular sigh that meant she was at peace, the way she moved through our home – our home – with the unconscious grace of belonging. We had children. We had inside jokes worn smooth from retelling. We had the kind of love that had been tested and refined, no longer desperate to prove itself, settled instead into something as essential and unremarkable as breathing. She asked me to get something from the next room, I can’t remember what – it was an ordinary request, the kind made a thousand times in a real marriage. As I stood to comply, something fell from the table in front of me with a thud. And I woke up.

The grief was immediate and devastating. I lay there trying to will myself back, but dreams don’t work that way. It was all gone. My family, my home. She was gone. Or rather, I was gone – vanished from her world as suddenly as if I’d been vaporized. I found myself mourning a woman I couldn’t even picture, aching for a life that had never existed in any way I could prove. Days later, weeks later, even now as I write these lines with a tear, I carry this loss like a phantom limb, feeling the absence of something that was never there. Or was it? What if it was there? What if she’s still there, in that continuing dream, wondering where I went? Did I simply vanish mid-stride from her perspective, there one moment and gone the next? Is she grieving, too, in whatever reality dreams occupy when we’re not there to witness them? These questions, once posed in the liminal space of a late-night thought, continue to haunt me with their implications. We wake each morning, returning to what we call the “real world”, as if crossing back over a border from a land of mere shadows and echoes. But what if our departure from that dream realm is less an escape from illusion and more akin to simply… leaving?

i. Tug of the present
There is an inherent malaise in how we wake from dreams. We don’t choose when to come and go, most of the time. We are simply expelled – whether from the nightmare, mundane existence, or bliss. We wake up disoriented as our mind tries feverishly to recalibrate itself to the wakeful world. Forced by the responsibilities of our wakeful selves, we dismiss the wonderland and configure ourselves back into the moment. We shake off their residue like water after swimming, confident that those vivid landscapes, those people who spoke to us with such urgency and familiarity, have dissolved into the ether of our unconscious. We assume their existence was contingent upon our presence, that we were not merely visitors but the very substrate upon which that reality depended.

But consider the phenomenology of the dream state itself. While dreaming, we don’t experience ourselves as architects of reality – we experience ourselves as participants in it. The dream world presents itself with its own logic, its own continuity, its own cast of characters who seem to possess histories that precede our arrival. The stranger who knows our name, the childhood home with rooms we’ve never seen before, the city that feels both foreign and intimately familiar – these aren’t experienced as creations but as discoveries. When we wake, do these worlds collapse like quantum wave functions, existing only when observed? Or do we simply lose access to them, the way a radio loses a station when tuned to a different frequency?

ii. Cross-pollination
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that dream worlds might indeed possess their own reality comes from what we manage to carry back. I’ve heard symphonies in dreams, complete songs with lyrics I’ve never encountered, melodies so haunting that I’ve stumbled from bed to hum them into my phone before they dissipate like morning mist. Where does this music come from? If dreams are merely the random firing of neurons, mere reorganization of daily experience, how do we account for this original creation? Paul McCartney famously woke with the melody of “Yesterday” fully formed in his mind, so complete and perfect that he spent weeks asking other musicians if he had unconsciously plagiarized it. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” emerged from a vivid dream. Mendeleev saw the periodic table arranged in a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson credited his “brownies”, the dream-beings who performed plays for him while he slept, with providing the plot for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” This isn’t simply inspiration, it’s transmission. It’s as if these artists and thinkers become conduits between worlds, carrying back fragments of another reality’s creative output like bees carrying pollen from flower to flower. The dream world gifts us its art, its science, its stories, and we wake clutching these treasures, trying desperately to transcribe them before they fade. Apart from the living experience of dreams, ever found yourself in an immersive movie or gaming experience while in a dream? Ever wish a ‘dream-recorder’ were invented so you could capture those experiences for replay? So if, during the course of our dreams, we can bring back their music, their ideas, their innovations, doesn’t that suggest these originate somewhere? That they exist independent of our materialization of the dream? A song has to be playing somewhere for us to hear it, even in dreams.

iii. Ontological equality
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 sensible 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. 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.

iv. 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 melody, 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. Just as a bee doesn’t create the pollen but transfers it, enabling new growth in distant gardens, perhaps we carry ideas, melodies, and stories between the waking and dreaming worlds. Both realities are enriched by this exchange. Our dreams incorporate the physics and faces of waking life; our waking life receives the impossible architectures and revolutionary insights of dreams. This would explain why dream-sourced creativity often feels discovered rather than invented. 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.

v. Continuity
“Does the dream continue without you?” This question transforms from a mere whimsical speculation into something more curious when we reflect deeply on it. Every night, we encounter people in our dreams who react to us, who seem to have their own concerns and destinations. We meet them mid-story, their lives already in progress. When we wake, when our consciousness withdraws from that space, why should we assume their stories end? Perhaps that melody you heard in your dream continues playing after you wake, in that reality you can no longer access. Perhaps the dream-poet whose words you desperately tried to remember keeps reciting to an audience you’re no longer part of. The profound conversation with the dream-stranger that felt so important – maybe they’re still waiting for your response, wondering why you suddenly vanished mid-sentence. Or perhaps in the physics of that world, sudden vanishing is normal, even expected – no more like a twinkle in the night sky; you know it’s there, and you also know that momentarily it may no longer be there; neither state fazes you. Plot changes in a dream often come unannounced and unsurprising, no matter how radical. This isn’t to make a metaphysical claim about the objective existence of dream worlds – though neither can we definitively deny it. Rather, it’s to recognize the presumption in our casual dismissal of these experiences. We are so certain that consciousness creates reality rather than discovers it that our presence animates rather than simply witnesses.

vi. Parallel
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 more porous than we imagine. 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.

vii. Living questions
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 can’t help not still love and miss her – a ghost in my memories, completely transparent to my best attempts at reconception. Yet, as real as daylight, and very much adored.

We are all vagabonds of consciousness, carrying more than we know between worlds. Waking life, after all, is simply the dream we’ve all agreed to have together. Every morning, 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. 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 where the whimsical tide of dream waves has washed him onto. 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.

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