On Dreams and the Nature of Reality

A beautifully hued orange cloudburst of cumulonimbus clouds layered before one another with the setting sun's reflection glowing off of them rendering them like fire
Photo by Taryn Kaahanui / Unsplash

Before we begin, a few notes. First, this title makes quite the claim, but I ask that you read this like you are an avid lover of literature and I am a classic author: read between, under, above, and through the lines. Allow yourself to project onto my words. Let the meaning become what it must – for that, after all, is the nature of reality. Excuse me my failings as I anticipate this will neither be as organized as my essays nor as poignant as my prose. I am, after four years operating under the all-consuming illusion of complete distance from modern human society, reintegrating into living in an urban environment. Everything my life has been based on for four years – and all of the relearning and breaking down and reforming of self that it took to get there – has changed in what feels like the blink of an eye and I can no longer take any of it for granted. While I am blissful in what this means we are now capable of offering to our children and the support we can give and receive to and from our families, it truly cannot be overstated how enormous this shift actually is. Yet here in this destabilization comes the genesis of these musings: reformed, incubated through such different experiences that I find I'm capable of crossing the tracks, straddling the crossroads, living in the shoes of very different ways of living and experiencing. Perhaps, based on all of my other crossroads crossing and chameleon-like experiences, this is integral to what I'm here to do: I am the one who sees all sides, who agonizes over what it means to know what's behind a perspective that seems diametrically opposed to yours but which really is not, to know how reality is constructed, dreamed, fantasized, rather than formed.

When I was a kid I dreamed a lot about asphalt. Odd dreams: laying in the middle of the road, feeling the heat of the pavement, barefoot, as a semi truck was about to mow me down and feeling utterly unphased. Running in the evening in the summer under city streetlights for hours and coming back in – the whole dream just this: running on an endless sidewalk, staring mostly at my own feet, with the whole of the world around me just black and I in pools of light just running, playing, and then entering the house dreamed over and over again.

It begins here like streetlights and summer pavement on bare feet. Black stains on soles, brought in on worn carpet. You never listen, and now you’ve gone and made a mess again. But here, with that feeling of worn-out and hours-in-the-sun, you can’t do much but curl up in bed.

Asking, as Jung or Freud might, "what does this dream uncover about the mind of the person having it" feels silly. Perhaps I was dreaming, perhaps I was living an alternate kind of existence. Perhaps those are the same thing. Do you think we live our dreams? By some definition dreams are coming true as they're being dreamed, despite that we forget them in the morning. A tenuous reality, dreams, but a reality nonetheless.

What they lack is consensus. But perhaps this is not necessary. The Toltec practice dreamweaving: sharing their dreams, setting intentions for them, and through long term group Practice of this sort they find their dreams knit together: they share dreams, work magic in them, operating together in some kind of communal astral Work.

Is all that separates dreams from reality, then, Practice? Learning how to step into them? Is all that separates reality from dreams consensus? That we've knit our experiences together enough to agree that this is all really happening?

Is reality taking the place of dreams, now, then, and vice versa, as we slowly unravel our consensus, live in entirely different worlds, unable to imagine why the other feels the way they do, experiences what they experience? Walking down the street feels a bit like a dream, one where only a select coven has been knit into mine, the others having their own dream through screens and individualized, algorithmic fantasies.

What, then, is our responsibility to learn to dream? To practice weaving our dreams with one another, to practice worldbuilding in our dreams? To weave our waking experience in with others – especially those who seem absolutely insane to us? What of the cultivation of reality, rather than just acceptance of it? What is the line between lucidity and activism, activism and narcissistic delusion? Could it be a silk thread, something that tethers in pattern?