What Our Dreams Tell Us About Ourselves and About the World

In her bedside table, my grandmother kept a very important book. Having lost its cover long ago, it appeared as a slightly exploded-looking collection of ratty pages, the corners flipped and slightly grimy. It was a book that had been through a lot. Open it up and you’d see that the mayhem wasn’t confined to the tattered outside; the pages were heavily noted in blue pen. This was my grandmother’s Lucky Numbers Dream Book, a compendium of every type of person, place, or thing you might encounter in a dreamscape, and a corresponding number for you to play in the lotto.

It might seem like a cheapening of dreamtime’s mysteries to put them to work for us in such a way, but my grandmother grew up in a broke, abusive household, her sweet mom and passel of sisters all at the mercy of the drunken patriarch. She escaped that place and landed in a nurturing relationship with my grandfather—a happy-go-lucky Sagittarius who was disinclined to fighting, let alone abuse—but life was never financially easy.

My grandfather dropped out of high school to serve in World War II, and from then on worked as a machinist. My grandmother ran a cash register at the department store downtown. This was what was available, and there wasn’t much more. If you had dreams, literal or figurative, of pocketing a little extra cash, it would have to come from the lotto. Which, in my grandmother’s time, was illegal.

This is how it worked: My grandmother, a dreamy Aquarius, awoke in the morning and worked to remember her dreams. They tended to be vivid, so it wasn’t normally much of a chore; more often than not, the problem was a plethora of dream images to work with, too many images and their corresponding numbers. She was on the beach (319) and saw a dolphin (750) caught up in a wave (745). Oh, 745 was also her daughter’s house number, so make sure to play that one, maybe place an extra dollar on it.

My grandmother would scribble all this intel down in a notebook—a dream journal with ambition, basically—and pop it in her purse. At some point during the day, Johnny the Bookie would swing by her register at the department store. My grandmother would write down her numbers and hand the man a roll of dollars; the women who worked the register alongside her did the same. If she was lucky—and her dreams and her guide guaranteed her she would be, at least occasionally—Johnny would come by the next day with my grandmother’s payout.

My grandmother experienced these dreams as a mystical thing, a bit of magic. She’s had the experience of having lightly prophetic dreams; watching the nightly news, a particular story would trigger a cascade of memory, and she’d gasp—she’d dreamed about this, last night! A witchy woman without a safe route to explore and own this aspect of herself, she leaned into dreams—something so common, so universal and daily, yet deeply mysterious, connected to a reality somehow beyond our conscious selves. When she hit the number because of a dream she had, it felt like the ultimate proof that there was more to life, that some benevolent energy was looking out for her, speaking to her psyche through images and symbols.

Lucky numbers dream books like my grandmother’s originated in the northeast United States in the 1800s; although white and Black folks alike played the numbers, anti-gambling efforts of the era portrayed the game and its players via negative stereotypes of African Americans. The same publishers who put out books of racist humor soon were printing dream books attributed to “Aunt Sally,” a chubby-cheeked, kerchiefed mammy figure, as well as other non-white races prone to exotic stereotypes, such as Mehemet Ali and Gypsy Witch; even Mother Shipton, a famous Anglo witch from England, was given “Oriental” knowledge.

But, by the 1920s, Harlem-based psychics and entrepreneurs were publishing their own dream manuals and selling them locally, to the same clients who swung by for a fortune-telling or a candle spell. The reality was, white-run banks would not loan money to Black people, and playing the numbers was a legitimate way to maybe score the cash needed to survive and maybe thrive. The leading Black publisher of lucky dream books was Caribbean immigrant and Harlem resident Herbert Gladstone Parris. His books are still published today under his pseudonym Professor Uriah Konje; this was the book my grandmother worked with. My heart leapt when I found it on the internet, still in print. I ordered a copy, and for a week I lived as my nana did, jotting down my dreams upon waking, then seeking their numbers in the book—supplementing, when necessary, from the free, online versions now available.

I still remember the dreams I had the week after buying the book, since my experiment with witchy dream gambling relied on me paying so much attention to them. After falling asleep while watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal The Holy Mountain, I dreamt of poop; another night I was stranded in rural Mexico, at a defunct train station. Every afternoon I walked to the Armenian grocer across the street and placed my hopeful numbers; “Good luck,” the friendly lady who worked the register said as she pressed the printout into my palm, a benediction. I’m not as lucky as my grandmother, who “hit” often enough to have faith in the game. I won no money during my week of dream gambling, but appreciated the deeper connection to the ineffable—inspired by my witchy ancestor to mine my dreams for good fortune in my waking life, taking a chance on randomness and chaos.

Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams took place in the realm between life and death, and that dreams contained messages from the land of gods and spirits. The oldest recorded nightmare in human history comes from Egypt, circa 2100 BCE: a man was haunted by a recurring dream of his father’s dead servant creepily staring at him. The guy wrote a letter to his dad, also dead, for help. The ancient Greeks and Romans, influenced by Egyptian culture, continued the tradition of valuing dreams as complex sources of knowledge.

Learning that these long-ago and faraway people also had dreams of their teeth falling out leaves me feeling connected to a collective unconsciousness that seems to transcend spacetime. Rather than write off such a classic dream as your basic anxiety dream, the ancients turned to a metaphor of the mouth as your environment, with your top row of teeth representing the people closest to you, and the bottom standing in for acquaintances and various NPCs. Your basic tooth-loss dream becomes something deeper to work out in a framework such as this.

We all know that dreams are tunnels to our subconscious, where we keep all the things we know but don’t want to know that we know. Memories suffused with longing or distress, childhood fears; the source of all desire perhaps lives here. My sex dreams tend toward the comically absurd or embarrassingly desperate. One memorable night I experienced an actual orgasm from a dream in which I hugged Ronald McDonald in a dark garden full of broken Grecian statuary. I could write a book unpacking the imagery: Clowns! Tenderness! Spooky environment!

For many years I dreamed I was in the same building as my deepest tweenage obsession, Billy Idol, and if I could only find him, I could have sex with him. I had these dreams regularly from age 13 till around age 48, when I finally met up with him on his astral tour bus and did the dirty. Was it worth the wait? Sort of! That the dream preceded the shift of my marriage status from monogamous to polyamorous, an era during which I slept with bunches of cisgendered men for the first time in my life, was not lost on me. It was a predictive dream, but I was more fascinated with how it was evidence of processes happening at such a deeply subconscious level, I was barely aware of them. The puzzle of how to work with attractions to cis men as a queer, feminist woman had apparently been occupying my psyche for decades, and Billy Idol was the pretty face of that dilemma.

Now, I don’t only believe that my dreams contain hints about the future, I know it to be true. In my twenties I went on a doomed road trip. I didn’t know it was doomed, but my companions were destined to fall out with one another, and I’d be forced to choose sides. Taylor, who owned the vehicle, was in unrequited love with Max, and Max’s lack of interest provoked in my lovelorn friend a fierce bitchiness. By the time we hit New Orleans, the vibe was unbearable; Max opted to Greyhound back to California, and I felt compelled to travel back with him. The morning Taylor dumped us at the Greyhound station in the business district, I didn’t know I was in for a low-key supernatural experience.

The very first night of our trip, the three of us had spent the night at Taylor’s grandparents’ house in the Midwest. It was the scariest night of my life, as I was stricken by sleep paralysis till the sun came up, a prolonged experience that inspired a lot of fear and confusion. At times it had felt like my soul was trying to leave my body, but not in a fun, let’s-astral-project-and-fly- around-the-Eiffel Tower way. More in a something is trying to steal my spirit kind of way. This exhausting night of little sleep ended when I awoke from a rather mundane dream that had filled me with terror. The dream was a simple vision: the head of a man in a type of uniform not unlike a police uniform, with that shape of hat upon his head. He faced away from me, and then turned toward me, looked me in the eye, and began to speak. The dream had no audio; his mouth moved but I heard nothing. His expression was calm, friendly, maybe a little bored.

There was nothing scary about what I was seeing, yet my body was gripped with an immediate panic, the sense that I was not supposed to see what I was seeing. A horrible wrongness, a transgression. Aware now that I was dreaming, I succeeded in shaking myself out of the vision, the night’s paralysis gone now that the morning sun had risen. I told my travel comrades about my strange and creepy night over coffee, and put it out of my mind as we plotted our course through the South.

That truly fateful morning, as I waited in line to board my Greyhound bus, I watched my dream come true. The driver taking tickets, head cocked to speak to a coworker, finally turned to address me, and my sleeping vision solidified: that pleasant, calm face; his uniform cap on his head; his lazy drawl: “Your ticket, ma’am?” I was shook, stared at him a beat too long, pulled myself out of it before he asked if I was okay, and boarded my bus with goosebumps roiling my body. A part of me knew the road trip would take this unexpected turn—not just a vague, intuitive, hunch way of knowing, but a crystal-clear, literal way of knowing, as if the entirety of our lives is projecting on a screen somewhere, ultimately known and knowable, if only we were able to enter the theater.

I’ve told this story a lot, and have thought about it even more. Like the time I saw a ghost—for real—it helps me trust my sense that there is more to our reality than the mundane if beautiful world we inhabit on the daily. Whenever I think about it, I’m struck by that powerful sense that I was not supposed to see it. I believed I was hitting on a cosmic truth as real as the prophetic nature of the dream itself. But why? Is it that we’re not, ultimately, equipped—physically, mentally, emotionally—to comprehend the nature of our existence, which this dream provided the tiniest hint of? Would it cause us to stray too far from the path of consensus reality, making life impossible, perhaps tragic for us and those who love us? Would it spoil the plot, thereby spoiling our ability to be surprised, for our soul to learn certain lessons? Are we trapped in a simulation, the fear I experienced part of my programming to not look too closely at the glitches? I could sort of believe any of it.

What I do know is what my grandmother seemed to know, and what the ancients surely did—that our dreams may indeed be a surreal rehashing of events and anxieties, but they’re all swirled together with something more as well, coming from a part of us that knows more than we think we do, where our connection to the mysteries of the Universe are strongest, wisest—prone, if we’re lucky, to spitting out, every now and then, an uncanny gem for us to work like a mystical puzzle that reaffirms our belief in spiritual possibility.

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Excerpted from Modern Magic: Stories, Rituals, and Spells for Contemporary Witches by Michelle Tea. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.