#If you wan't to read about different views on the matter of time I suggest to you Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed

[welcomewithmetonight-thechaos]

Dream of the Endless and the problem with time.

Been doing a lot of thinking about dreams and time recently. Actually, Dream is the Endless closest to his father, closest to being out of time. Destiny is written in Destiny’s book, which means all of it is there all at once, but it becomes chronological by reading the book. Desire and Despair both have an object which is in time, to which relations are formed over time. Destruction takes some object in time and has an effect on it, which needs time. Death spans several periods of time from there beginning to their end, each life only lasts until their time runs out. Even Delirium exists in time, even if she might make people lose track of it. 

But Dreams are inconsistent, every dream may in itself be a story, chronological, but there is no link between one dream and the next except maybe for the personal growth and experience of the dreamer, which may be driven by dreams but again takes place in conscious hours, outside of The Dreaming. If linear time is to be understood as a row of cause and effect, it is not chronological in the Dreaming but tumbled and fragmented. It almost exists out of time, which passes in the Waking, tying together events and making progress and long.lasting attachments possible, because every night it is reset, making place for a new story.

One of the reasons that Dream’s personal growth took so long might have been that he had a lack of relations with a realm where time passes chronologically, thus allowing change. He changes a lot during his imprisonment in the Waking, where things are forced to happen in order.

The reason why he could fall in love with Nada so fast is that time is fleeting in the Dreaming or maybe does not pass at all. If he promised her forever, how long would it last? Maybe just for the span of one night, and one dream, maybe all of the Dreaming’s existence.

That is to be said, for Dreams and nightmares time does pass only partly chronologically; think of the Corinthian realizing over time that he wanted to be his own person, but also think of Cain and Abel always forced to repeat the drama endlessly.

Time is introduced to the Dreaming by the Dreamer’s and even so at multiple points simultaneously and not at all after its usual cause and effect logic.

Now think of Dream as the personification of the collective unconscious, which is not at all linear or logical, basically random inserts of lots of different thoughts all at once, very few of them leading anywhere, some of them repeating endlessly (it is very likely that Dream’s mind works as if he had ADHD).

Imagine, if you will Hob and Dream arguing over which realm is more real:

Hob: “Everything that happens in Dreams is of no consequence, people don’t even remember it most of the time.”

Dream: “It is of the utmost consequence. People need dreams to understand themselves, to learn.”

Hob: “Yeah, but all that learning happens in the Waking. People can only know themselves really if they’re consciously thinking about it.”

Dream: “What even is consciousness if there always repressing their true intents. In my realm everyone is their truest self, thus the Dreaming must be more real.”

Etc.

(On that account, I think the whole storyline with Dream’s ruby and John Dee unlocking people’s secret dreams is very Freudian).

Anyway, Dream appears as a being who by his nature is not designed for change and capable of it only within other realms, through the help of others.