Throughout recorded history and likely before that, people have found deep meaning in dreams. In ancient Egypt, dreams were a way for deities to communicate with the dreamer. Native American cultures viewed the dream space as a sacred one, where a person could step outside the bonds of mundane existence and connect with a more universal consciousness. And in Australian Aboriginal mythology, the ancestral spirits dreamed the world, including their own forms, into existence. The Aboriginal name for this period of creation – common across many dialects and languages – loosely translates as Dreamtime, or The Dreaming.
Our modern understanding of dreams – and the belief that our unconscious wandering is linked to our waking
