Dreams
I am unspeakably grateful to the gods for their gift of dreaming. Dreams are a way of integrating death, which is divine, with life, which is always finite. When we wake up from a dream, we get to remember a little piece of infinity, taking it with us into wakefulness, which takes place inside sleep. It’s impossible to imagine humanity without dreams. We would know nothing about the gods or about the structure of reality that lies outside of what is immediately visible. It would probably not even be possible for us to have thoughts, since all thoughts, in a manner of speaking, come from dreams; any being with the ability to think must also have the ability to dream.
Dreams are basically trustworthy. When a dream disagrees with religion, the dream is more likely to be true. All religions are derived from dreams,1 but the religions are by now far removed from their origins, whereas a dream always comes freshly plucked. Dreams are myths told by the gods themselves directly to each of us. However, it must be admitted that while the dreams themselves are pure, our memories of them may be influenced by other factors; indeed, since dreams come from reality itself, they are infinite and hence cannot be remembered fully. We remember only images of dreams, not the dreams themselves. Thus, one dream may have multiple “interpretations”—and none of them will be exactly right, in the same way that no poem can capture any object with complete precision, since the object is infinitely detailed whereas a poem always has a finite number of words.