The collection of essays that make up this book was intended to comprise ideas that support the fictional world of my last long series of books, starting with The Lamia and building through the Snow series. An earlier essay in this sequence was titled Dreamworlds and serves as a sort of lead-in to this one. But I have come more and more to pretend that it is all true. So here I am again, carrying on with that pretension. Let's see where it leads.

It starts with an inversion, the idea that what we call "real life" is the dream. We are immaterial mind-beings, who together dream what we commonly call reality. It's a magnificent shared dream, but still a dream.

In the earliest Dream Time, we knew this. But the intensity of the shared dream overwhelms the individual, personal mental reality. And we forget that we are dreaming.

Raven made the dream. Raven represents the impulse to create paths through the possible. Paths that become the probable, the actual. Paths that are remembered. Dream memories.

Then Eagle made the rules of mutual dreaming. Eagle represents the impulse of those who dream to dream together. Rule one is, everyone in a shared dream must dream by the same rules. So we all share the same dream space. We all know and follow the same basic rules in our shared dream realities. This allows us to believe that we understand one another.

Who are the dreamers? They are the entities who construct the dream, who hold the dream together. They are me and you. To have a shared dream, for every me there must be at least one you. We suppose this to be the starting point, what we might call the primordial dream. 

Clearly our dream world is far more than that. Practically speaking, we might as well assume that it is infinitely more than that. Certainly more than we could encounter in a single lifetime. We can assume it starts with a single dream atom, and builds from there. Each such atom would represent the smallest unique element of thought. 

Everything we encounter more complex than that is then a combined dream, a shared dream. The "real-life" body we inhabit is already a shared dream, a marvelously complex shared dream, one we take to be unique to our own existence. Beyond that, everything we witness in the world is already part of many shared dreams, perhaps as many as the atoms that comprise it.

We in this existence have become adept at sharing dreams. We share dreams with every person we encounter. Contemplating this, if we extend "person" to mean every entity we encounter that may retain the faintest impression of such encounters, the sharing is constant and vast. 

At this point, I pause to consider the implications of my composing these thoughts for you to read. Clearly it is my intention to share these thoughts, with you and others like you. And I may hope it will be equally clear that I welcome any such thoughts you choose to share with me. 

In this, we distinguish ourselves from those entities who cannot or do not participate in similar sharings. Here again, there is a wide spectrum to consider. Does a woodpecker who drills a series of holes in the trunk of a tree not leave a similar message? One that may perhaps be more meaningful to other entities than people like you and me? In our present incarnation, we can only imagine the woodpecker world dream. To truly understand it, we would have to become the woodpecker.

In our world of today, we can read almost daily of messages that originated in the farthest reaches of the universe, the depths of the seas, or other points of origin our kind are only beginning to observe and decipher. Who knows what other entities exist for whom observing and understanding such messages is already commonplace? Who knows what dreams they dream.

In the old Dream Time, perhaps there were those who chose to incarnate in a woodpecker dream, and perhaps again in many of the other commonly encountered spirit dreams that touch on our present dream reality. The dog dream. The cat dream. The flower dream. The tree dream. The rock dream. And on and on.

In our present understanding of the world dream, how many alternate dream worlds do we fail to share? When we pass from this our dream of today, who really knows what dreams may come.