29. building worlds

and the meaning of dreams

Mar 31, 2025

“Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?”
- Havelock Ellis

Are dreams unreal?

Dreams are alchemy. Intangible thoughts, borrowed from awake-time, stitched into a mind theater, viewable with closed eyes and only by you.

Dreams are psyche. Speak in symbols, no syntax, live rehearsals. What you censor while awake re-renders in 70mm at night, scribbled by the unconscious and presented as raw material.

Dreams are portraits. Of your unfiltered self, sketches that in their abstractness nudge against awake-time happenings. The soul’s deep architecture is under construction. The portrait disappears in light and only reveals itself again when it’s positive that you are the only one watching.

Dreams are memory. Memories are already a flawed mosaic of your perceived past. If it’s not in the now, it doesn't exist anymore except as your remembrance of it allows it to. Dreams are the encroaching of the past and future tense on your now.

Dreams are real. They are your workshop of unfinished canvases that become your arsenal in awake-time. They can’t predict the future or re-render the past, but they can reveal the present in a language that makes perfect sense to you and is incomprehensible to everyone else.

Dreams are world builders. Cartographers of the terrain inside your head and rovers of the terrain beyond it.

Follow the lights

Imagination and memory light up the same part of your brain as real experiences. Your brain, in a very literal way, does not differentiate between doing, remembering, and imagining (Shacter).

When you dream, your brain lights up in similar ways to when you are fully awake. Especially during REM sleep, parts of your brain that handle sight, sound, emotion, and movement light up as they do in real life. That’s why dreams feel so real.

There’s a part of your brain that remains dark. The part that censors, handles logic, and exercises self-control is quiet. And so, only in dreams can you fully run the experiment:

Why do dreams fade so fast in the morning? Dreams feel real, but the memory-saving part of your brain is on low power. When you wake up, alertness can “overwrite” fragile dream memories before they fully encode.

Unless you catch the dream right away — by replaying it or writing it down — it usually fades fast.

But if you can capture dreams before they escape, especially the ones that replay, you hold a looking glass into your psyche that allows you to build worlds in non-fiction.

“Building worlds in fiction is a given, but building worlds in non-fiction is done a lot less.”
- Utsav Mamoria

Build non-fiction worlds

All reality was once fiction. This is why you should read more of it, as it often preludes real life and pushes on the margins of what it can be.

Every innovation, tradition, or system begins as a spark in the mind. What is everything if not built from belief? Dreams contain the raw material to collide vivid, abstract vision with reality constraints. The focus on this gap is called mental contrasting.

Mental contrasting involves mentally juxtaposing a desired future outcome with the current reality, focusing on the gap between the two
- Gabrielle Oettingen

When you dream, you enter reality’s rehearsal space. Here, dialogue means nothing; strange luminous symbols speak. What you fear to admit or dare not say surfaces as scenes where you are a forced participant.

The dream does not ask for permission, you are required to bear witness to the residue of awake-time on your latent psyche.

“Dreams are the answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.”
- David Lynch

Imperfect recall

Memory is an imperfect archive. You’re accessing stories, and they may constantly be changing based on the last time they were read by you.

You are the editor. The past doesn’t exist except as you allow it to. The future, like the past, is also only constructed in the now.

“The past no longer exists — it’s just a memory appearing in the now. The future does not yet exist — it’s a dream of a future now appearing in the now. Life is just a series of nows.”
- George Mack

Your mind, when dreaming, doesn’t invent anything; it just remembers. In an ancestral, autonomic way. You remember what you are unable to even perceive as you are experiencing it. To ignore this is to forget what is real.

Momentary returns to the original self are only accessible through dreams. There, at the very bottom of the well, what cannot be seen in consciousness because it’s too bright.

“Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
- Inception

The dream isn’t meant to make sense. A recurring figure, a disjointed scene, a surreal emotion that lingers after waking — these are clues. Dreams speak in a dialect of riddles.

Isn’t that the most interesting thing in the entire world?

Yes, this jumps from one non-sequitur to the next. That’s the point.

Dreaming wide awake

Returning to source material. What did you dream about last night?

Every dream, no matter how absurd, is rooted in something real. It might distort, exaggerate, or collapse timelines, but it points reliably to places the conscious mind avoids.

It’s the dreams that make the least amount of sense, I realize later, that carry the deepest resonance. Absurdity is how the psyche bypasses resistance.

“Perhaps this reveals something interesting about the nature of consciousness itself: that what we call identity is less a continuous thread than a kind of quantum superposition, multiple selves existing simultaneously, collapsed into singular narratives only through the act of observation.”
- Tina He

The superpower is learning to dream, wide awake. Exercising feelings and desires of which you are not fully conscious. Allowing the unconscious to speak and putting the ego to sleep.

Perhaps that’s what dreams are (made of) — chrysalides of your future selves in future lives that remain drafts, for now. Unfinished, but whispering.

One more thing

If you made it here, you’ll find the below interesting, too. Some people who inspired me to write about this, and some writing of their own:

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