“I was in my house, but it wasn’t my house.” For anyone who’s ever tried to explain their dream—or had to suffer the recounting of someone else’s—this is a familiar contradiction. “It was, but it wasn’t” seems to be the best way we’ve found to describe the simultaneously strange and ordinary worlds our subconscious builds. Separated from “real” life, the sleeping mind generates its own images, where the rules of space and time relax. We can slip easily from a nondescript office to our second-grade classroom, except that the door leads outside to a field we’ve never seen. Shifts in scene and character occur seamlessly, and we accept them unfazed; in dreams, unburdened by rational thought, the illogical tends to make perfect sense.
“I was in my house, but it wasn’t my house.” For anyone who’s ever tried to explain their dream—or had to suffer the recounting of someone else’s—this is a familiar contradiction. “It was, but it wasn’t” seems to be the best way we’ve found to describe the simultaneously strange and ordinary worlds our subconscious builds. Separated from “real” life, the sleeping mind generates its own images, where the rules of space and time relax. We can slip easily from a nondescript office to our second-grade classroom, except that the door leads outside to a field we’ve never seen. Shifts in scene and character occur seamlessly, and we accept them unfazed; in dreams, unburdened by rational thought, the illogical tends to make perfect sense.
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