Dream Time - is it a timespace of its own?

Some people love to hear about other people's night dreams and to talk about their own.


I don't; never did. The only dreams that interest me are people's so-called "daydreams".

It's not that I don't find dreams interesting. It's just that there seem to be different types of dreams, and it's very difficult to understand their meaning unless one is deeply involved in the dreamer's life.
Some dreams seem to "recycle" past events, others seem to (and sometimes do) predict future events, and others just seem to be... a timespace of their own - a territory unknown, yet oddly familiar while one is in it.

But today I find myself wondering: is that dreamscape, the apparent "spacetime" of dreams, perhaps an actual (para-physical) field, accessible from outside the dreamer's mind?

Two nights ago I had a series of dreams. They were - as my dreams usually are- convoluted and alien to the everyday world in their imagery, to the point of being impossible to retell (although they made perfect sense in their own "spacetime").


When I woke up, the only thing I remembered was the "tail" of the dreams: a beautiful music that had something - I couldn't remember what - to do with stacks of gold coins or money.


I didn't dwell on it, but I did try to recall the music; and for a few minutes after waking up I was able to repeat the tune. (It was something I had never heard before.)
And then, of course, I stopped thinking about the dream altogether, all the more so because there was no specific mood associated with it (I do remember feeling very happy hearing the music, but there was no impression of a powerful "message" lingering, as sometimes happens).

In the afternoon I met with an aunt of mine and her daughter, my cousin. As we were talking about some unimportant things, my aunt mentioned a cashier. At that point my cousin jumped in and said: "Right! That reminds me! I had the weirdest dream last night: about a cash register playing a song..."

Walfrido Garcia: Dockside Dreams, taken from here.

At this point I found myself staring at her and remembering my dream at the same time: yes, that was it - it was an open cash register that the music was coming out of. That's what all those stacks of "gold coins" that I vaguely remembered were.

I told my cousin that I had the exact same dream. I told her so with a straight face, and even though she said she believed me, I am not sure she did.

I asked her - and tried to remember myself - whether there was anything on television or in the newspapers in the previous days that could have made us both dream of that. She couldn't remember, and neither do I. 
(At this point probably I should mention that I have an exceptionally good memory and, even more to the point, that I am usually extremely aware of my own thoughts and reactions to my surroundings. In other words, it's not easy to pump anything into my head without my knowledge.)

I asked my cousin about the details, but there were few she could remember: that she was happy and she laughed when she saw those cash drawers open rhythmically, with all those stacks of coins, and the music came out of them.


So was I. Her description sounds exactly like what I remember from my dream.
(At least now you know what makes our hearts sing...)

In order to test... I don't really know what (that it could have been a false memory?), I even tried a trick. I asked her: "Didn't you have a similar dream a while ago? Remember?"

She didn't remember.
(Of course not.)
Nor do I remember having a similar dream at any point in my life.

Whatever it was, nobody will convince me it was a "coincidence". I mean, what are the odds of that happening?

But whatever it was, it was not the first time it happened in my family.
My mother told me, a long time ago, that when she was a girl she shared a dream with her mother.

My grandmama being the down-to-earth-person that she was (and I must say, most of my family are like that) didn't dwell on it or even try to analyse it. Luckily, my mother remembered it. And I'll always regret Carl Gustav Jung never got to learn about their dream, as I am sure he would have been fascinated by it and would probably offer some interesting explanation.

What could be the explanation for such a phenomenon?
Based on other, non-dream experiences and lifelong thoughts about these matters I am inclined to think that families and friendships - perhaps any sort of interpersonal relationship - are more than more or less temporary physical conglomerates. The "pool" of their shared input - thoughts, emotions, experiences - may transcend the mere visible physical realm; and it may even outlive all of the individual members that contribute to it and tap from it.
If that is so, then it could be considered a sort of "timespace" in its own right.

And that is the reason why I wrote about this here, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with time "slips".
If something so deeply individual-seeming as a dream image is accessible, or generated by, or both, by more than one person at the same time, it inevitably opens the question about the nature of space - and thereby the question of the nature of Time.


EDIT: Here is a very useful Dream Dictionary, for those who are interested in the meaning of dreams.



If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.