Dream Territories
By Vivianne
There’s a place I go when I close my eyes that has no laws of physics. Where I can breathe underwater and walk on ceilings. Where the dead are alive and the conversations I never had happen with crystal clarity. That place is more real than this room, even tho it disappears as soon as I wake up.
I’ve been told my whole life to keep my feet on the ground. That dreams are just electrical discharges, random, meaningless, worthless. What matters is the tangible: bills, schedules, responsibilities. But no one explained to me why, if dreams are so insignificant, I remember them more clearly than most of my waking days.
In my dreams, I have conversations with versions of myself that I never became. The one who chose a different career. The one who stayed in that country. The one who was brave when I was cowardly. They exist in the liminal space between what was and what could have been, and they are as real as any self that has ever walked consciously through the world.
There is architecture in my dreams that defies all logic: houses that are both my childhood and my future, rooms that expand infinitely yet where I can reach every wall at once. Stairs that go up and down to the same place. Doors that lead to oceans. And all of this makes sense while I’m there. Dream logic is its own truth.
The surreal is not an escape from reality. It’s access to layers of reality that the waking brain can’t process. It’s where the subconscious speaks without the filter of reason, where fears and
desires take physical form, where you can float not because gravity has disappeared but because you’ve finally let go of the fear that kept you anchored.
I’ve learned more about myself in dreamscapes than in years of therapy. In dreams, I can’t lie to myself. I can’t pretend I’m not afraid when I’m being chased by something shapeless. I can’t deny the longing when I find myself searching for someone in endless labyrinths.
They say “it’s just a dream” as if that makes it any less. But my dreams are where I’m most honest. Where I allow impossibilities that my conscious mind censors. Where the woman I could be if I weren’t so afraid finally exists, even if only for the duration of the dream.
The world tells me to be practical, realistic, to finally plant my feet. But my feet are tired of solid ground. I want to walk on clouds. I want to breathe in spaces where normal laws don’t apply.
I want to inhabit the territory where the impossible feels attainable.
Because maybe, just maybe, if I can do it in my dreams, I’ll eventually find the courage to do it while awake.
The dreamscape is not an escape. It’s a rehearsal.
It’s where I practice being free before risking it in a world that doesn’t forgive fantasy. And if that makes me a dreamer, impractical, with my head in the clouds, so be it.
I prefer to live in two worlds than in none.
