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 alternate versions of them. Objects are out of place, furniture is oriented differently, and the unnamed, alien items of our previous dreams are on full display once again. Even the environments we’re most familiar with are laden with these inconsistencies.
Most of the places I go within my dreams are based on places I’ve spent much of my waking life. Based on — but never the same. In dreams, I’ll often find myself walking through old schools or the neighborhoods that I grew up in. I go to my childhood camp and the homes of old friends. I spend time in my bedroom; sometimes, I’ll even edit and write — regardless of whether or not I can actually save. I go to old classrooms and walk through the forest near my house.
But even though so many of these places I go to are so clearly based on significant places from my life, none of them are ever the same as in reality. So many of these places are so steeped in my memory that I can see them clearly in my mind’s eye. And yet, each time that I dream, these familiar places reassemble into these foreign, unfamiliar versions of themselves. Each time I walk through the woods near my house, they grow into something vast and mysterious.
In this forest I know so well, aberrant structures, mountainous caves, and abyssal chasms appear along the trail that winds through it. A meadow appears beside the barrier between the trees and what’s ordinarily houses. A little fence meanders through the meadow, but it’s been almost entirely retaken by nature. In dreams, it’s as though everything is a less concrete and more mystical version of itself.
My bedroom is more open, and everything is out of place. There’s an intricate series of tubing that juts down from the ceiling. Its function is unclear. In my closet, if I climb high enough, it opens into a non-existent, Harry Potter-expanding-tent-esque attic.
The room defies physics. It’s wide open, dusty, and not the most welcoming, but the opportunity I see in all of this unused space fills me with excitement each time I rediscover it. I’ve found this secret attic now within a hundred different dreams of mine. Non-existent rooms appear in my basement; one of them leads into a labyrinthian maze of underground passageways and corridors deep beneath the earth.
I know the halls of my high school like the back of my hand, and yet each time I return here within dreams — it’s different. The same different. It’s a sameness that’s unmistakable. Entire stories worth of classrooms appear from out of nowhere. A rickety elevator leads toward an unexplored network of forgotten custodial corridors — every time.
If I remember this high school, why does my mind always choose to do this? Why do these variations present identically from dream to dream? Even when I used to be a student here, and I traversed these corridors daily, my dreaming mind would still distort its details. But I didn’t remember my dreams very well back then. I woke up most mornings with a powerful sense of dreamy repetition, but I struggled to recall just what it was that was so similar about all of these experiences I kept having.
There was something deeply uncanny to me, though, about the way my mind constantly seemed to retell itself these stories. There was an undeniable familiarity with so many of the locations and scenarios in which I found myself, but I just hadn’t yet developed the retention to examine these patterns in any meaningful way. Each morning I woke up with this unnamed sense of synchronous reoccurrence — like an earth-shattering deja vu peeking through a misty dawn.
Before I started journaling my dreams, my retention of these experiences was limited. The sense of profundity encased within these nightly narratives would lose their allure by the time my first-period bell rang each morning. And then, each night, I’d return to those same places and situations, none the wiser.
Over time, my retention of dreams has gradually grown, and it’s given me a unique opportunity to really sit with some of these stranger discrepancies. Before, it was largely just a feeling that these nightly hallucinations of mine were whisking me off into this alternate realm of things that are the same but different. “Maybe you’re just convincing yourself you had that dream before,” I’d tell myself. “Maybe it just felt like you held that object before,” I’d say.
Now that I remember my dreams, though, I can say with certainty that these alien environments do repeat themselves. And the repetitions in these narratives we tell ourselves each night sometimes appear like far more than coincidence. It’s difficult to deny a sense of meaning, too, in the deviations to these familiar places that we frequent. Within dreams, there’s an eerie consistency to these deviations.
Each time we arrive, these alternate environments present themselves in the same way. And often, it feels as though there’s a profound purpose to their painstaking sameness.
I’m still a little reluctant to say that it’s an alternate universe or plane of existence that we travel to in our dreams, but the more time I spend immersed in them, the more I begin to wonder. When I can perfectly envision so many of the significant places from my life by just closing my eyes, it doesn’t feel like an accident that my sleeping mind would so repeatedly and so purposefully distort these details.
What exactly it does mean, I’d hardly even venture to say. But I think that our ancestors may have had far more insight into these ephemeral creations than the culture that’s largely convinced itself that this critical part of being alive isn’t even worth remembering. Dreams are a part of who we are. To forget their value is to close the door on some of our most breathtaking artistry.