Many of us have had a dream where we feel inside the dream as if we are in a different era than the one we inhabit when we are awake. The experience of this is hard to give language to, but sometimes we might use words like “it felt so real,” or “she looked just like she used to” or “I remembered details about the place I had completely forgotten.”
Essentially, there is usually some kind of perceptual experience of sensory information in the dream that when we wake up, we feel as if we have gone somewhere (as well as some other “when”) and returned.
Travelled …
Here’s a very common type of “time travel” dream:
I’m in the hallway of my high school. I have five minutes until the bell rings. I realize I left my textbook in my locker. I run back to retrieve it and on the way, I am met in the hall by “Sheri,” a girl who always bullied me in junior high, but who I managed to avoid mostly in high school. My heart begins to race. I need to get to my locker to grab the book, but I really want to turn around and avoid Sheri. She smiles at me that evil way she used to. Like a predator at her prey. My body freezes. I can’t move.”
Have you dreamed a dream like this? One in which you are in a familiar setting from the past — ie. high school — and there is some kind of dilemma, encounter, or event that in the dream looks or feels so real that it stirs in you a response you haven’t felt in years? One you thought you had “gotten past” or “grown out of?”
Here is another common type of “time travel dream”:
I’m walking in the mall with a pack of girls. We are moving from store to store. I recognize one as my best friend, Allie, but the others I don’t recognize. It feels fun, free. We giggle as we walk past a pack of skater boys hanging out by the arcade. One of the cutest skater boys smiles at me. I feel tingles in my spine and a kind of anticipation or excitement I haven’t felt in years.”
Dreams have the power to pull us back and in, don’t they? It’s one of the many reasons why dreams are so compelling. We wake up from a dream like one of the above and for just a minute — sometimes longer — we feel as if we were actually inhabiting that past self and space. The feeling of having been there and then is so…convincing. More than any VR game.
The more vivid and sensory rich your dreams, the more real these time travel dreams feel. Further, the more you remember your dreams, record them, and dwell in them (through dreamwork, for instance), the more you have access to the “time travel experience” when you wake up.
This vivid time travel-like experience can be so full-bodied and seemingly with such depth and form that when we wake up, we may struggle to fully inhabit this time period, this version of ourselves, this present setting, space, and form.
There can be a kind of jet lag, so to speak.
In a recent audio chat on Patreon, I spoke about this jet lag in broader terms as the side effects of frequently “moving between realms.” Essentially, I explore how our active and vivid dreaming can sometimes be unsettling as we attempt to toggle between this daily waking life perceptual experience of physical space and linear time, and the less tangible dream realm where activities like time travel or teleportation seem possible.
Why can this toggling between realms be so unsettling?
One reason is because we start to question what we have been taught about reality and time. We start to doubt what we knew until now to be true. We star to wonder what is actually happening when we go to sleep at night and dream these vivid dreams.
As we are shaken or moved by a powerful dream experience, we start to seek understanding of it. We head out in search of explanation or for community.
What most of us quickly learn, however, is that subjective dream experience is a seriously understudied field with very little evidence-based claims. Scientists who are studying sleep and dreams are not typically focusing on the phenomenology of dreams, but rather the biochemistry or neurophysiology of humans who dream and what happens as they shift between sleep and waking states. That research is, of course, very important and valuable, but it’s not so helpful to those of us seeking answers to questions like: “Am I time traveling in my dream?”
To me, questions like these are the most important questions to be asking about dreams! Since we all sleep and subsequently dream (even when we don’t remember them), an individual’s experience of a dream and how it affects or impacts them physically and emotionally in their waking lives seems of utmost significance to me.
And yet because subjective dream experience is (so far) impossible to observe and difficult to measure, it’s often too complicated for any clinical research scientist to endeavor. (The reason for this is usually tied to money, or lack thereof.)
What we do have available to us as it relates to the subjective experience of dreams comes mostly from philosophers, metaphysicians, and experiencers themselves, not clinical research scientists.
In the absence of clinical research, I’ll try to offer one answer to the question; though it is just a theory. Time travel in dreams may, in fact, be possible. It may, in fact, already be happening to you and others. We actually don’t know.
What we do know is how traveling back in time in dreams, so to speak, affects us.(And my informal research shows that it really affects us.)
It’s immersive and we feel something. Usually we feel something we haven’t felt in a while.
The experience often seems to serve a purpose, to provide insight, to awaken us from some emotional stupor, unhealthy pattern, or false narrative about our waking life. Perhaps, this travel through time in dreams is intentional even. Perhaps, a higher version of you — the dreammaker — is the travel agent.
* * *
I’ve been recently doing some investigating of hypnogogic states (the state just before dreaming when visual images or sounds seem to pop up out of nowhere.) I found a paper published in 2022 that reviews the literature on these states. A 2013 study showed that brain areas that process specific perceptual stimuli show activation during the perception of corresponding stimuli when the individual is in the hypnagogic state. I’ve read other papers that indicate something similar about dreams and dreaming: Basically, when we “see” images in our sleep or in sleep onset, the same areas of the brain that are stimulated during waking visual perception are also stimulated during sleep and dreaming.
Our brain perceives and responds to images whether our eyes are open and taking in visual stimuli, or whether they are closed and the images are arising from “elsewhere.” (We can call this elsewhere “the dream realm,” the imagination, the collective unconscious, the unconscious mind. But we don’t actually know with certainty from where the images arise.)
It’s pretty awesome to consider the implications of this. Specifically, as it relates to “time travel” dreams, it’s one way of explaining why dreams of being your past self or dreams of occupying a past setting can elicit such a strong perceptual experience of being there and then.
With dreams, images are spontaneously arising in you while you sleep. You perceive those images and respond to them as if they are “real.” For some of us, it’s not just visual images that arise, but smells, tastes, and touch, too.
No wonder philosophers and poets alike have questioned which is more real, the dream or the waking state. No wonder some of us wake up from a dream and Google “is it possible to time travel in a dream?”
It reminds me of the Edgar Allen poem that seductively haunted me as a child, “A Dream Within A Dream.”
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
(Full poem here.)
For what it’s worth, I believe it is very likely we are able to travel differently through space and time inside our dreams. My personal experience alone informs me of this. I don’t need “science” to tell me that it’s happening.
That said, I am curious to know more. I am interested in understanding and I tend to be very explanation-oriented. Fortunately, it’s a very exciting time for those of us in the field of studying consciousness (into which this kind of dream research inevitably falls.)
Stay tuned.
