This is my other life, the one that happens after I fall asleep. It's often far more vivid and intense than my waking life, perhaps more meaningful, only slightly less confusing.
My dreaming world and my waking world have in common that I can't control them and they often take me places I don't want to go. They connect to each other like parallel universes, in strange and unpredictable ways. Sometimes one becomes a refuge into which I escape from the disturbances of the other.
I have always been fascinated by this other, intangible world into which we retreat, the reality and origins of which are so unknown, so mysterious. It is like a portal into which you can pass into another dimension, a mysterious forest you can ride through to reach Babylon, a lost valley of Brigadoon that comes almost every night, not every 100 years.
Linear time and space are twisted here, analogy is rife but sometimes indecipherable, action often skips to action with many of the boring spots removed, like a fast-paced movie. Feelings and senses are intensified, yet in some ways protected. Although there is no limit to exploration, it is yet not a place where you can choose to do anything you like... you are constrained by certain rules and limits which surely must be self-imposed (we assume, since we imagine we are the only "real" person in this world) but if so, why can we not mold them? This is so similar to the perspective of the waking world that it tests the very nature of reality. And though certain things are clearly connected to or inspired by the waking world, (and perhaps vice versa), there are also those elements, even people and places, which exist only in the dream life... where did they come from?
I know when I write down my dreams I tend to remember more of them, so I choose to do that again now, for better or for worse.
In addition to the dream life being inhabited by persons, places, and memories that don't exist in the walking world, I also sometimes encounter, use and understand words in my dreams that don't exist in the waking world, and maybe they should. Here are some that I both remembered the word and meaning of it upon awakening:
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