the dream world is the real world
the internal reality inside of us is so much more powerful than the external fictions to which we are compelled to contort ourselves
whenever i was inside my dream, i felt her reality: i knew i’d been with her for so long, but she was gone now, somewhere out in space, and i had to search for her. i would stand in my space ship, staring out the window into the stars, wondering where she had gone. suddenly i would wake up, a man again, and i accepted that somehow: pretending to be a man upon departure from the true reality inside. i even told people about these dreams as intriguing stories, like fictions. but no dreams are fiction.
mountains in northern italy (photo my own, 2022)
the dream world is the real world: the dream world is the space where we encounter our authentic selves buried deep underneath the identities that have been forced upon us. sometimes i think that’s why we struggle to remember dreams. when we wake up from a dream we are waking up to an unreality: we are awakening into a fabricated world full of made up concepts that possess and automate us. we accept them as reality because to reject them as fiction would be to create upheaval in our lives, which are deeply integrated into webs of artificial cultural constructs that dictate our thoughts and expressions.
as a coping mechanism, we forget our dreams.
there are ways to remember dreams better and to more deeply access them. i got into the habit for a while of dream journaling. and now i realize: these dreams were the manifestation of my true self; these dreams were myself constructing itself as it saw itself. even as I moved through the world with a sense of disassociation from myself, there was some portion of my psyche which recognized the true self when i was asleep. when all the inputs of the fake world around me were at last suspended, my imagination constructed a world more true than the one generated by my senses.
the inner world is the ultimate reality: this is something we must never forget when others tell us things about ourselves and try to make us believe things about ourselves. the world which we experience is a product of how we manifest our own internal reality. when we manifest our true selves, a new reality renders itself before us: new people, new ideas, new discussions, new freedoms, new rules, new boundaries.
icebergs in southeastern iceland (photo my own, 2024)
when the inner world clashes with the outer world, it is the inner world which we must embrace. a new outer world will emerge. as my friend told me when i first fully came out, “there will be a new equilibrum.”
what follows is a combination of writing from five years ago, when i first deeply explored these dreams, and additional writing from a few years later, when i felt an emotional compulsion to explore them again. i was searching them for meaning.
the writing is stylized with capitalization (as i was writing at the time).
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I am a rich woman now, which is to say that I finally command the resources which I require to find you. I gaze out at the Big Dipper from my sky palace, imagining you out there. Just outside the columns of colossal rectangular windows towering over me, bird armies majestically circle the high-tech cloud fortress in which I am ascending toward the edges of space. You have changed your identity, or maybe I have changed mine, but somehow we have lost each other. The memories of our past are new and disorienting, hopelessly fuzzy but precisely defined, without a shred of detail beyond the utter certainty that you have always been my destiny, although I have not seen you in decades. Though plagued by an urge to run away from each other, you and I have a great romance. Who fled first is something I cannot yet say because I do not know.
Memory, I remind myself, is not like a photograph, and yet I am ready to believe every impression of the past which is emerging in my mind. There are no images, no pictures, only crippling sensations of longing and nostalgia which provide the primary impulses behind every action I have taken to find you. Who are you? I have no idea; your face seems not to exist. But we always knew, it suddenly strikes me, that we wouldn’t see each other until 2084. I am living the whole last 97 years right here with the bird armies who circle me, and I come to a blurry understanding of the impetus behind my life over the course of the past century. My entire being is constructed only from the abstract need to find you, wherever you are out there in the stars. That is why I have changed my whole identity, so that you won’t get wind of my approach.
The utter blackness of the universe replaces the blue sky. I clutch with regretful longing to my undesired place in space and time. I am not a young college girl anymore, seducing you to come “study” in my dormitory, where under the cover of our science finals we crafted the most diabolical spells to unleash upon our many Christian enemies. I am an empress now, actually; that is to say, I am a majority shareholder in a world governed by corporations. The heavily indebted and immobilized State has withered away, reduced to the ceremonial role of building roads and bridges, and my elite security forces supplement the unparalleled power of my sorcery. Here in this empty hall, dominated by stunning views of the Southern and Northern constellations, is where I hold court in the evenings with my closest confidants. But tonight I am drinking wine alone while gazing out into the stars of the Big Dipper, although the serenely flapping wings of my space-bird army occasionally obscure its light. You are orbiting one of those stars right now, aren’t you? That is the place you always told me you would go, and soon we will be there together.
blurry shot of moon from beach at night (photo my own 2022)
I have searched for you for 75 years, my love, so that you have been my only real romance across all these decades. This is despite the painful truth that I have neither seen you nor heard from you even once in all that time. You betrayed me, even left me for dead, but I have never ceased to want you. I’ve never forgotten the way you abandoned me looking helplessly up at you from the surface of Mars; you ran way from me, you left me for her, simply because you thought that was best for me. But I know you are out there now, floating somewhere through that constellation which we always used to look at when we were camping. The same stars we promised we would visit together one day. And now, after having finally achieved the wealth which I amassed exclusively to find you, I have at last seized the technology I need to go forth. Mighty legions bow down before me and my purse. My officers and scientists, who are so obedient to me that they will die for the romance I crave, are even now charting our course to get to you. We will be old women together, and we will be happy at last.
In my memories you are a bright and luminous presence, more like a spirit than a person. I can remember your skin and hair, or at least what they felt like in my hands, although I would not be able to describe your contours, sizes, or colors. What I know is that we had something in our twenties which fused our souls into a shared space between us, so that right now parts of us are lost together somewhere in the staggering blackness between my star and yours. You must have felt the emptiness all these years as I have. I know because I remember the time it was you who came looking for me, and it was then that I changed my identity. I had become addicted to my misery and the story it gave my life; I had to make it to 2084 without seeing you, because then I would be able to stand here and say that I spent all those decades focused on this goal. For what else could I have worked or lived, aside from looking for you? What meaning would my career have if it wasn’t moving in that direction? But now, nearing the end of my life, it is time. Overwhelmed by my foolishness and the sadness it has caused me, I am crushed beneath the immense weight of regret at the very moment when I should be reveling in the climax. My officers, no doubt having completed their plans, come walking toward me from somewhere very far away, and I stifle the streaming tears which are beginning to flow from my eyes.
northern michigan in the evening (photo my own 2023)
I am still crying when I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and realize I have to go to work. The emotions hit as strongly as the sensation of falling does at the end of other inter-dimensional travels; it seems absurd that someone could suggest this wasn’t real. Maybe it wasn’t me, but it was someone I became for a while. I quickly write down notes on my phone about each and every detail from the other world, hoping this practice will cultivate a heightened consciousness during the nights to come. I will remember this world in that one, and I will use such knowledge to my advantage. At work, it takes me a few hours to come close to stop believing in you, but even then, I know that the other world is an authentic part of my lived experience. For I truly was a woman then. I really was in command of that ship. I genuinely was in love with you. And I am anxious to launch my explorations of the galaxy, which knows me even if you don’t anymore, and I pass the day at work contemplating the necessary steps.
At work, I complete an hour’s worth of research on the Internet about how to become more self-aware during my dreams. The journal has been my standard practice for the past few weeks, and I am cautiously considering others. I write bullet points immediately upon waking up, not daring to move too much lest some internal alteration obliterates the memory, and then I craft these notes into a narrative later. The more consistently I have done this, the more intense my dreams have become, at least in terms of how I am able to remember them, and I have felt myself developing increasing amounts of agency. Sometimes I can remember details from previous dreams and connect them to the current one, but not once have I yet achieved full awareness that I am in fact asleep. Instead of being conscious of a fantasy around me, the supposed fiction in my mind has simply become more real.
the pacific ocean (photo my own 2022)
I have come to secretly believe that these dreams might be other dimensions. It’s an opinion I would not dare share with anyone aside from my closest friends, and in most cases not even then, because among them are several apostles of the sciences, staunch believers in experiments and materialism. They have faith in neurological delusion as an explanation for any experience which deviates from the limits they impose. I don’t want to talk about this with the people who believe based on reason; I want to discuss it with those who believe based on aesthetics and emotions, for this has become one of my guiding principles. How far will I go? Can I meet up with the genuine manifestations of my friends from the real world if we can only find each other in the dream world? About this, I am agnostic. There is no evidence for souls, yet most people believe in them. Because we experience our souls and others’ souls, and because our certainty about the soul had to be beaten out of us by scientists. So if I believe in something as vague and undefined as a soul (although I am not sure whether I do), is it really so far-fetched to also believe in an inter-dimensional dream world?
Something about all this deeply disturbs me, and it prevents me from truly committing myself to the project of lucid dreaming. There are so many other methods I could be employing beyond intensive dream journaling, such as frequent “reality testing” throughout the day in the “real world.” A friend of mine took the plunge once, though, and he shared a few terrifying incidents. He described being trapped inside these dream worlds for long periods of time, increasingly panicking that he might not ever wake up again. At one point, he told me, he had suddenly lost the ability to continue walking. When he looked back behind him, he saw half his leg perfectly severed and detached. It was frozen a few inches in the air, in the same position as if it had just stepped off the ground, and all he could do was stare at it for hours. And then there was a friend of a friend who claimed to have become trapped in a dream for years. He insisted he was trapped in there for what genuinely felt like a decade, and yet he had only been asleep for a night. My friend, accepting that this really happened, vouched for the source’s credibility. I wanted to believe, and my skepticism annoyed me. But even if I critically scrutinize the account during the day, it still joins the many monsters who haunt me after dark, so that the cautionary tale works upon me like a horror movie. Despite my longing to achieve yet higher levels of lucid dreaming, the idea of being trapped in there for years spooks me in my own bed, holding me back.
Tonight, as I fall asleep, I am sure to stay focused on the memories of my spaceship, my bird armies, and you floating around out there in the Big Dipper.
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i was only afraid to be trapped in the dream world because i was afraid to embrace reality.
i was only afraid to believe in my soul because i was afraid to believe in what i felt inside.
who was she? it’s so clear now: she was me. i was out there in the vast stretches of the universe looking for myself. the lost lover i wanted so much was me.
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