Which World Does the Dreaming Self Belong To?
On dream, consciousness, and what we call reality.
I am someone who dreams almost every night.
Sometimes, all it takes is closing my eyes before I slip into another world. Even a brief nap on a bus can carry me into a dream.
What fascinates me is that the waking world does not disappear completely. The vibration of the bus engine, fragments of conversations from strangers, the automated voice announcing the next stop — all of these can quietly weave themselves into the dream, becoming part of a story that did not exist just moments before.
To this day, I have never learned how to control my dreams. Perhaps that is precisely what makes them so captivating. Like life itself, dreams unfold beyond our control. We never know whom we might encounter, where we might end up, or what version of ourselves we might become. It is this uncertainty that makes dreams both beautiful and mysterious.
There was a period in my life when I became deeply attached to dreaming. I did not look forward to sleep merely because I was tired. I looked forward to it because I wanted to dream.
My dreams are rarely connected by a continuous storyline, yet they often share remarkably similar settings. There are places I have visited repeatedly since childhood — buildings that do not exist in the waking world, yet feel profoundly familiar within dreams. I know where they are. I know how to move through them. Entering them feels less like discovery and more like returning somewhere I have been before.
Some details recur with striking consistency. The elevators inside these buildings do not move up or down. Instead, they travel horizontally, carrying people across different spaces. And I almost always find myself high above the ground, looking down upon cities and landscapes below, yet rarely feeling afraid.
Sometimes, I return to the clouds. There, I experience a sense of stillness and peace. I do not need to be seen, nor do I need to be found. I simply exist.
Even now, I cannot explain why these scenes continue to reappear throughout my life. They may be nothing more than the random creations of a dreaming brain. Or perhaps they are simply part of my own private language of dreams.
Whenever these places return, I am left with the same peculiar feeling:
I am not arriving somewhere new.
I am coming back to somewhere that has always existed.
I rarely have nightmares. More often, dreams offer me another way of experiencing life.
I have also noticed that my dreams are almost always experienced from a first-person perspective. Just as in waking life, I never actually see myself. I observe the dream world through my own eyes. I feel the wind, the warmth, the joy and sorrow within it. I know that I am there, yet I have never viewed myself as an outsider.
My dreams are in colour.
And the version of me that appears within them often seems freer than the person I am while awake. I frequently find myself flying, or leaping impossibly high and far, effortlessly overcoming distances that would be impossible in reality.
There is no fear.
No limitation.
No concern about falling.
I genuinely like the person I become in dreams.
Carefree. Unrestricted. At peace.
Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder which version of myself is the more authentic one. The person constrained by responsibilities, time, and the limitations of the body? Or the one who moves freely through dreamscapes, untouched by the rules of the waking world?
I couldn’t help thinking of Zhuang Zhou’s famous dream of the butterfly.
Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly, fluttering happily without any awareness that he had once been Zhuang Zhou. Upon waking, he found himself once again to be Zhuang Zhou. Yet a troubling question remained: was Zhuang Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or was the butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuang Zhou?
More than two thousand years later, we still do not have an answer.
We naturally assume that the waking world is reality, while dreams belong to the realm of illusion. Yet the joy we feel in dreams is real.
So is fear.
So is grief.
And so is love.
While we are dreaming, we rarely question the reality of what we experience. What transforms a dream into “just a dream” is often nothing more than the act of waking up.
In Chinese culture, there is a saying: “What occupies the mind during the day will appear in dreams at night.”
Dreams therefore seem deeply connected to our daily thoughts and emotions. Modern psychology offers similar perspectives, suggesting that dreams may play a role in memory consolidation and emotional regulation. Feelings left unresolved during the day may re-emerge in another form at night.
Yet reality appears more complicated than that.
For a long period of my life, there was one person I thought about every single day. Someone who had already left. I assumed that if dreams truly reflected the contents of our minds, then eventually we would meet again there.
But we never did.
Not once.
In waking life, our paths had already diverged completely. I had imagined that dreams might offer one final place where reunion remained possible.
But even dreams remained silent.
Eventually, I realised that perhaps some forms of longing cannot be fulfilled through dreaming. Instead, it was insignificant people and forgotten fragments of memory that appeared unexpectedly in my dreams.
This led me to wonder: are dreams really extensions of our waking thoughts? If dreaming is part of the brain’s process of organising information, then who determines what remains and what disappears? What role does consciousness play within this process?
Whether it is joy, grief, fear, or longing, the emotions experienced in dreams are often impossible to ignore. The details of a dream may fade quickly, yet the feelings can linger long after waking. A beautiful dream can shape my mood for the entire day; a distressing one can leave behind unease that lingers for hours.
If dreams are merely illusions, why do the emotions they evoke feel so undeniably real?
There are moments when I struggle to distinguish whether something truly happened or existed only within a dream. Occasionally, I experience déjà vu — a place, a conversation, a fleeting moment that feels strangely familiar. I do not know whether such experiences arise from errors of memory or from traces left behind by dreams.
Sleep itself is a curious phenomenon.
We accept it so naturally: closing our eyes, surrendering our awareness of the world, and returning to consciousness several hours later. Yet the more I think about it, the stranger it becomes.
In the space between closing and opening our eyes, hours disappear.
Our bodies remain here, lying quietly within this world.
Yet consciousness seems to journey elsewhere.
In waking life, we experience reality through the body. We walk, touch, observe, and remain bound by distance and time. Much of our understanding of reality is built upon bodily perception. Dreams, however, appear to follow a different set of rules. The body lies still, yet consciousness travels through cities, revisits childhood memories, encounters people who have long since gone, and sometimes lives entirely different lives.
If consciousness can only exist within the familiar structure of space and time, why do dreams present such radically different modes of experience? Could dreams be reminding us that our understanding of dimensions arises primarily from the body rather than from consciousness itself?
Of course, I cannot prove that dreams originate from another dimension, nor can I prove the existence of parallel universes.
Still, I cannot help but ask:
If all experiences of reality ultimately depend upon consciousness, what allows us to assume with such certainty that waking life is more real than dreaming?
Is reality an inherent property of the external world? Or does it emerge through conscious participation? If no consciousness existed to perceive, remember, or observe, would what we call “reality” still retain its meaning?
Perhaps dreams prove nothing at all.
But they may remind us that our understanding of reality is far more limited than we tend to believe.
Zhuang Zhou left us no answer.
He left us only with a question.
And even now, we continue to stand at the boundary between dreams and waking life, wondering:
Are we the ones experiencing dreams,
or are dreams, in some way, experiencing us?