What happens in dreams?
Complete worlds that vanish, and the unease of not knowing which side is home.
Ancient World
A sage wakes and cannot tell which side of the dream is home.
Once He Dreamed He Was a Butterfly
The state of Song, traditionally · c. 4th century BCE
Art & Literature
The Circular Ruins
A magician dreams a man with such care that the dreamed one can stand, and then learns the cost of that care.
A temple the story will not locate · 1940
Philosophy
Beside the Stove
A man sits through a winter of doubt, and finds a remainder he cannot unsay: that thinking is going on.
A stove-heated room in Germany, later on the page from the Netherlands · 1619 / 1641
Philosophy
A monk answers the charge that if there are only presentations, nothing could bump into anything else.
Twenty Verses, Not a Simulation
Gandhāra, as later tradition seats him · 4th–5th century CE
Science
The Eyes, Still Sleeping
A graduate student in Chicago watches a sleeping child’s eyes jerk beneath closed lids, and sleep stops being a single blank.
University of Chicago · 1953
Sacred Traditions
The Isthmus
A Murcia-born Sufi describes a realm that is neither spirit nor body: the barzakh, where imagination is a world, not a mistake.
Damascus, after Andalusia and Mecca · 1200–1240
Science
A sleeper in a Stanford laboratory moves his eyes in an agreed pattern. The movement is the proof that he knows he is dreaming.
Asleep, and Knowing It
Stanford University · 1981