Last night I was a woman. I lived in a city I have never visited, spoke a language I do not know, and felt completely at home in a body that was not mine. When I woke, I lay still for several minutes, confused about which life was real.
This happens often. In dreams, I have been a pilot, a criminal, a child again, an old man dying in a hospital bed. I have lived in houses I have never seen but navigated perfectly, as if I had walked those hallways for years. I have known people whose faces I cannot place in any memory, yet in the dream, they were family.
Where do these lives come from?
The scientific answer is simple: dreams are random firings of neurons, the brain processing memories and emotions, meaningless noise dressed in narrative. I have read this explanation many times. It has never satisfied me.
Because the dreams do not feel random. They feel lived. When I wake from a dream where I was someone else, I carry that person’s feelings for hours. Their grief, their joy, their particular way of seeing the world—these linger like perfume from a room I have just left.
There is a theory in physics called many-worlds interpretation. It suggests that every decision creates a branch in reality. When you choose left instead of right, the universe splits. In one branch, you went left. In another, you went right. Both versions of you continue existing, unaware of each other, living out the consequences of different choices.
If this is true, there are infinite versions of me. The me who became a doctor as my parents wanted. The me who married the woman I let go at twenty-three. The me who moved abroad, who stayed in my village, who took that job, who refused it. Every road not taken is a road someone took—another me, in another branch, living the life I only imagine.
What if dreams are windows into these branches?
I know this sounds like fantasy. Perhaps it is. But consider: when you dream of a life you have not lived, where does the detail come from? I dreamed once of a childhood home with a blue door and a garden with a specific tree. I have never lived in such a house. Yet in the dream, I knew exactly where everything was. I knew which stair creaked. I knew the smell of the kitchen in the morning. This was not imagination. This was memory. But memory of what?
Perhaps memory of a life I lived elsewhere. A parallel branch where a different version of me grew up behind that blue door, climbed that specific tree, heard that stair creak a thousand times.
My grandmother believed dreams were visits. She said that when we sleep, our soul travels. It meets the dead, sees the future, goes to places the body cannot reach. I dismissed this as superstition when I was young. Now I am not so sure. Perhaps she was describing, in the language available to her, something that physics is only beginning to understand.
The strangest dreams are the ones where I know things I should not know. I have spoken languages in dreams—full conversations, fluent and natural—in languages I cannot speak when awake. I have performed skills I have never learned, played instruments I have never touched, understood concepts I have never studied. Where does this knowledge come from? Not from my brain, which contains no such information. Perhaps from another brain—another version of me who learned what I did not learn.
Sleep researchers say REM sleep consolidates memory. The brain sorts through the day, files away what matters, discards what doesn’t. But what if something else is happening? What if, during those hours of stillness, our consciousness connects to something larger? A network of selves, spread across dimensions, sharing information we cannot access when awake?
This would explain prophetic dreams—the ones that show us things before they happen. If time branches like everything else, perhaps our dreaming mind can glimpse branches that lie ahead. Not prediction, but perception of parallel futures, some of which will become our present.
This would also explain recurring nightmares. I have a dream that returns every few months: I am in a building that is collapsing, and I cannot find the exit. I have had this dream since I was a child. What if, somewhere in the multiverse, a version of me is actually trapped? What if his distress crosses dimensions, arriving in my sleep as a nightmare I cannot explain?
I do not know if any of this is true. I am not a physicist. I am just a person who dreams vivid lives that do not belong to me, and wakes wondering what they mean.
But there is comfort in this theory, even if it is only fantasy.
Because it means the lives I did not live are being lived. The choices I regret—the woman I did not marry, the career I did not pursue, the places I did not go—these are not simply lost. They exist somewhere. Another me is living them, experiencing what I can only imagine. My regrets are his reality. My roads not taken are his daily walks.
And perhaps, sometimes, he dreams of me. Perhaps he wakes in his world—the world where he married her, where he became a musician, where he lives in the city I only visited once—and for a moment he feels my life. The choices I made that he did not make. The joys and sorrows that belong to this branch, not his.
We are connected, he and I. All my parallel selves, scattered across infinite branches, linked by something we cannot name. When I sleep, I visit them. When they sleep, they visit me. We are one consciousness, fragmented by choice, reunited in dreams.
This morning I woke from a dream where I was old, much older than I am now. I sat on a porch I did not recognize, watching a sunset over water. I felt peaceful in a way I rarely feel when awake. I knew, in the dream, that I had lived a good life. That I had made the right choices. That I was ready for what came next.
Was this a glimpse of my future? Or a visit to a parallel self who made better decisions than I have made? I do not know. I cannot know.
But I carry that peace with me today. A gift from another life, delivered in sleep.
Tonight I will dream again. I will become someone else, somewhere else, living a life I cannot imagine while awake. And when I return to this body, this branch, this particular version of existence, I will wonder, as I always wonder:
Which life is the dream?
And which is the dreamer?