The first time I felt a dream had weight in reality, I was somewhere between five and eight years old, living in Santiago, and our cat had died in the night.
I didn't know that yet when I woke. What I knew was the dream: our cat, boarding a rocket, leaving earth. Vivid in the way certain dreams are vivid, not quite like memory, more like something witnessed from very close. I told my family. By then they already knew about the cat. My older sisters laughed, said I'd invented it after the fact, constructed the dream around news I'd already heard. I can no longer say, honestly, which came first in that morning. What I can say is that the dream and the death have stayed tied together in my memory for fifty years. Something in that coincidence asked to be held as real. But I was a child, and children learn quickly what kinds of knowing are permitted, and so I filed that experience somewhere private and carried it there for a long time without quite knowing what to do with it.
I was born in Senegal, and grew up moving. Dakar first, then Cameroon, then Chile, and finally Switzerland at twelve, a landing that was harder than anyone quite named at the time. A new language, a new culture, a new version of myself suddenly required, while my siblings and I navigated the difficulty as children tend to: mostly alone, mostly without words for what was actually happening.
During those years I had a recurring dream. A beach in Kribi, in Cameroon, a place I had loved, where we went on weekends, the Atlantic warm and the sand close enough to feel familiar even in sleep. In the dream I was always just offshore, caught in the waves, unable to reach the sand, close enough to see the beach clearly but never quite able to arrive. I didn't analyse it at the time, didn't have the vocabulary for that kind of attention, and in any case there was too much else to navigate consciously. I just had the dream, again and again, the way you carry the things that haven't yet found their way into words.
There was another recurring one, simpler and stranger: I lost my teeth. Regularly, across years, with a consistency I only later came to understand wasn't random. I had grown up with grey teeth and had been mocked for it often enough that the shame had gone somewhere underground, somewhere the conscious mind wasn't quite looking. The dream kept returning with the particular patience of the unconscious, back to the wound, again and again, until something was done. It stopped around the time I finally had the teeth fixed, the first thing I chose to do with my first salary, as though whatever had been tracking that unfinished business had quietly noted the resolution and moved on.
I didn't connect any of these things at the time. You rarely do. You just live, and the dreams keep their own record.
Years later, in a different kind of difficulty, not dramatic, nothing you could point to, just the low and persistent hum of not quite knowing which direction to move, I began paying attention to my dreams again. Not as a spiritual project, not with any particular framework in mind, just as a practical thing, something to work with when the more obvious tools weren't quite reaching what needed to be reached.
What I noticed, slowly, surprised me. Not the content of the dreams so much as the quality of attention they seemed to carry, the way something in the dreaming appeared to know, with some precision, what the waking mind was circling without landing on. It returned, patiently, to what was unresolved, addressed not what I thought I needed but what some quieter, less defended part of me seemed to already know I needed, and had perhaps been waiting for permission to say. Each time I brought one of these to the surface, really looked at it, sat with it, followed where it led, something shifted. Small things mostly, and occasionally something larger: a recognition that reframed a whole period of my life, that made sense of a pattern I'd been living inside without being able to see its shape.
I am not a mystic, and I want to be clear about that because I think it matters. What I keep returning to is something more stubborn and more ordinary: the intelligence that runs beneath the surface of a life, quiet and unhurried, and what seems to become possible when you learn, slowly, to listen to it.
We spend a third of our lives asleep, and within that time something is happening. Something that has been observed and mapped with considerable rigour by a tradition of depth psychology stretching across more than a century, a tradition that suggests, and that my own experience has echoed in ways I find difficult to dismiss, that this nightly world is not noise, not the random discharge of an overloaded system, but a different kind of intelligence, running on different hardware, processing what the waking mind cannot quite hold, returning always to what has not yet been received.
And yet. In daily life, in culture, in the conversations we actually have, dreams tend to be treated as curiosity at best. The slightly embarrassing thing you mention and then apologise for mentioning, explained away as coincidence or brain lag or the mind filling in gaps after the fact. I find something quietly impoverished in that, not a moral failing, just a loss, a whole dimension of human experience available to every person who has ever lived, and largely left unattended.
I wonder sometimes how many people are carrying something like the cat dream privately. Not as proof of anything, not as a claim they'd want to defend, just as an experience that didn't quite fit the permitted categories and got filed away somewhere because there was nowhere else to put it.
Did you have a dream in childhood that felt too weighted to dismiss, and learn quickly not to say so?
A recurring dream that ran alongside something hard and dissolved when it passed, with a logic that only became visible looking back?
A figure, a threshold, a symbol that returned so many times it became part of the furniture of your inner life, and that you have never quite told anyone about, because there hasn't been a place for it?
Most people, if they sit with it honestly, will find something like this. The experiences seem to be there. What has been missing is a space serious enough to receive them.
Reveries exists to make that space. Not to explain, not to diagnose, not to turn the unconscious into content or the dream into a productivity tool, but to make a place where what arrives in the night is received with the seriousness it seems to deserve, where a person can log what they dreamed, sit with it, and over time begin to hear what their own deeper life is saying.
And alongside that, to gather for the first time, at real breadth, a record of what the world is dreaming. Because if one person's dreaming carries this kind of intelligence, what might it mean that across cultures, across centuries, across lives that never touched each other, people have dreamed the same kinds of figures, the same shapes of threshold, the same recurring forms?
The atlas of the unconscious already exists. We are building the room where it can be read.Reveries was built on the work of others. Institutions, scholars, and thinkers who gave their lives to the inner world. If any part of this page found something in you, consider visiting them, or supporting the ones that need it.
ARAS, the IAAP, and Botanical Dimensions are non-profit organisations. If the work of this page found something in you, the most direct way to honour that is to support the institutions that made it possible.