Dream Time

It Was All a Dream

Dreams occupy that strange threshold between the real and the imagined, the waking and the remembered. “It was all a dream” unsettles because it questions what counts as reality in the first place. At its simplest, it points to perception: two people can live through the same event and recall it differently, because attention, prior belief, and emotion filter the details we encode. In that sense, “it was all a dream” is not just poetic—it’s cognitive fact. Each of us walks with a model of the world that bends away, sometimes slightly and sometimes drastically, from consensus truth.

This recognition can be liberating. Instead of blaming disagreement on moral failure, we can see it as a predictable variance in human model-making. The interventions then become practical: evidence-gathering, corroboration, cognitive therapy, sleep hygiene. Where there is divergence, curiosity rather than condemnation allows us to ask, why does your version of reality feel different than mine?

Dreaming in politics

But when the phrase enters political and social life, it acquires sharp edges. “It was all a dream” can become a tool of erasure—dismissal of activist voices as delusional, rewriting of histories as hallucinations, gaslighting whole communities by casting their lived harms as figments. It’s myth-making in service of power.

At the same time, marginalized groups sometimes reclaim the phrase as critique: “that prosperity was just a dream for us.” Here it points to inequity in who gets to claim reality as reality. In polarized times, competing “dreams” harden into clashing narratives, each insisting its story alone is true. The risk is that our shared reality fractures into incompatible worlds, making collective problem-solving impossible. The antidote lies in accountable evidence, public transparency, and institutions that prevent any single voice from monopolizing reality’s definition.

Dreaming as poetry

Yet there is also a softer register—a poetic one. “It was all a dream” can serve as elegy, not denial. Life itself may feel like a constellation we glimpse only from a distance, with moments shining like scattered stars. Each person arranges those stars into different shapes; what looks like destiny to one might look like fantasy to another.

The beauty of this view is its openness to plurality. Our realities are not identical, yet each pattern has meaning. The danger, of course, is drifting into relativism—pretending all dreams are equal even when some mask cruelty. But perhaps we can respond to each “dream” as we do to art: translate it, critique it, and keep weaving new constellations with others.

The cracked window

Think of a cracked window in your home. You notice it one day—how the fracture splinters across the glass, how the light bends differently through the broken seam. You could rush to repair it, but instead you pause. You sit with the crack. You watch how the sunlight shifts, how the edges glimmer at dusk, how the world outside comes refracted in new ways. You learn something in the waiting: that reality isn’t always to be fixed at once, that there’s wisdom in stillness, that your perception of what is broken may, for a time, become a teacher.

This is the work of dreams and memory alike. Each of us carries a windowpane that has cracked in its own way. Some cracks are traumas, some are questions, some are simply the marks of living. To judge someone for where they are, for which fracture they’re living beside, is to miss the fact that we are all at different stages of repair, reclamation, and reinvention. A garden of wildflowers thrives because it is not uniform; each stem bends differently toward the sun. So too with human lives and their dreams.

Dreaming together: reclamation, equity, and ritual

“It was all a dream” takes on another layer when we remember how entire communities were criminalized for the very same plant that now fuels billion-dollar industries. Cannabis reform must mean more than legal sales—it must mean repair.

Reinvestment in the neighborhoods most harmed. Expungement of records. Land returned or repurposed. Community gardens where cannabis is grown not just for commercebut for culture, ritual, and healing. These are dreams too—dreams of reclamation, where those once silenced now write the story.

Perhaps the cracked window is the site of injustice and the site of return. Perhaps the wildflowers grow best in soil turned over by truth. Perhaps cannabis is not just a substance but a symbol—of what was taken, what persists, and what might be shared anew.

Dreaming together: community, infrastructure, and innovation

Infrastructure is not just roads and wires—it’s the social scaffolding that lets people be who they are, where they are, without shame. A library, a health clinic, a playground, a digital commons: these are the frames through which communities decide whether to repair a crack, let it shine, or plant new seeds around it. (Community Image)

Innovation, in this light, is not about shiny technology alone. It’s about the courage to design spaces where plurality is not a threat but a resource. Where a neighborhood garden grows side by side with a makerspace, where art coexists with science, where AI is not a cold overseer but a collaborator that amplifies human imagination. If AI cannot dream,

it can still help us archive, connect, and expand our own. Meeting it in the middle, we might co-create a thought-garden: an infrastructure of stories, metaphors, and shared

tools that make space for everyone’s cracked windows and wildflower skies

And so maybe the cracked window is not a flaw but a constellation waiting to be seen from the right distance. Maybe “it was all a dream” is less about illusion than about invitation: to slow down, to notice the light refracted, to honor the fragile patterns that emerge before we take our next step.

Those are a few ways to read the phrase. It can be skepticism or consolation, denial or insight, neuroscientific fact or political tactic, poetry or pathology. Which meaning matters most depends on who is saying it, why they say it, and what we are willing to do in response—listen, question, hold accountable, or help someone wake up. Which reading feels truest to you right now?

A constellation of ritualized offerings—technical, emotional, and strategic—woven with cadence and clarity.

John Faircloth & CP