Perchance to Dream

I think it’s important to dream. Or, rather, dreams can serve an important function for us. Dreams, to me, feel like an imagined reality. An alternate reality, maybe? Where things, for better or for worse, exist. They manifest themselves within our dreamspace, and that dreamspace has no bounds or limits.

Dreams can serve as the blueprints to our lived reality, the world in which we share with others. How a dream can feel like it went on for hours or even days or, how a dream can show us a glimpse of the future. It may not be our future, or someone else’s future. It might not be an immediate future, or readily feasible future. But a glimpse it is indeed.

I’ve been reading about the Astral Plane, a place that exists within the lore of the Forgotten Realms (the place where the majority of D&D stories are set), and what documented information (that I could access, anyway) seemed to shed little light on the place. The most concrete answers were as such:

– It was the realm where the bodies of dead gods rest and decay

– It was the realm where githyanki (a sort of fantasy human/elf race) live, having rebelled against their captors (and went on to largely become raiders, but that’s another topic itself

– In the Astral Plane, your personal intelligence and wisdom served you better than convention strength or dexterity did. Which is to say that in this realm, the abilities of the mind reigned supreme.

In the Astral Plane, one moves simply by thinking, and one falls (or doesn’t) simply by thinking. Gravity only exists near the bodies of dead gods, their dwindling divinity possibly seeking a remnant of order through the creation of “normality”. It’s a realm where, if you can think it, it can possibly benefit you. The world of the Astral Plane is essentially “Earth but powered with dreams”.

And I think that’s a really interesting way of looking at things because, after all, is our society not powered by dreams? Those in power shape our world through their actions, born of thoughts, that have their roots in dreams. Those of us who seek to protect others like us, the vulnerable, the slave, the scapegoat. Through our dreams, we create the blueprint for our reality. Through our dreams, we learn that our potential is infinite, our ideals never too grand. As long as we think it, we can very well exist one day.

After all, we’ve already made the blueprint.