This installment in the Sandman saga explores how consciousness creates reality, a topic that I personally find intriguing.
Past and future both cast their ripples into the dreaming, Matthew.
This one short line spoke volumes to me. The dreaming is symbolic of the collective consciousness, which manifests individually in the subconscious mind, which surfaces during the dream state. The collective consciousness is affected by events past and future, as well as by the potential of infinite possibility. The dreamscape is where human consciousness explores the myriad dimensions of reality and possibility. There is another symbol that Gaiman uses throughout this text—the skerry. Skerries are reefs or rocky islands, essentially solid matter jutting up out of the water. Gaiman uses skerries to symbolize individual realities in a vast ocean of consciousness. Each individual reality casts ripples throughout the entire sea of consciousness. All out realities, no matter how insignificant they may seem to us, affect all other realities: past, present, and future. Think butterfly effect.
They walked past me, the living and the dead, and one by one they vanished into the darkness of his cloak. Then there were others walking past. Different wonderful characters — soldiers and courtiers, youngest sons and cats-in-boots: these weren’t the inhabitants of my land. These were someone else’s people — some earlier princess’s escape from reality…
As I read this, I thought about how what we consider to be reality is actually nothing more than shared fantasies and imagination. We project onto the canvas of reality our hopes and dreams and fears, and these become the fabric of our collective existence. I often wonder what would happen if we changes our beliefs and our fantasies. Could we recreate reality into something better? The more I consider it, the less flakey it sounds.
Okay. Here goes. Barbie’s idea. It’s like, that people… Well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. Isn’t that a weird thought?
Our realities are as vast and myriad as our imaginations. To dream and to create worlds in our minds is human. It is this capacity that allows us to visualize a better world, to strive for new things, to explore and create. The only thing that holds us back is fear. If we could lose our fear, we’d be free to explore the hundreds and thousands of unimaginable worlds within each of us.
Stuff Jeff Reads 
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