On Dreams, and the Time We Thought We Lost

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From the Desk of Lord Northwood

June 23rd, In dreams, we reclaim the moments time tried to steal.

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Dreaming, I’ve come to believe, is the closest we shall ever come to time travel. No machine, no clockwork contraption, no quantum trickery has yet rivaled the simple miracle of the mind slipping free from its tether and wandering elsewhere — backwards, sideways, sometimes even beyond.

In sleep, the rules of chronology are quietly revoked. Yesterday bleeds into youth, a closed door creaks open again, and the face you haven’t seen in years turns toward you, smiling like no time has passed at all. You may stand once more beneath summer leaves long since fallen, or trace the edges of a conversation that never had the chance to finish. And when you wake, you're left wondering whether it was memory dressed in costume, or a moment the universe kindly loaned you.

Where else can a long-lost love lean in for one last kiss, or a dog once buried still leap into your lap with that same familiar joy? In dreams, the calendar forgets its pages and the body forgets its years. What was lost returns—not perfectly, not permanently, but vividly. Sometimes painfully so.

Yet dreaming is not merely an escape. It is also a message—a language woven from symbols and signs that our waking minds struggle to decipher. Our subconscious speaks in riddles and poetry, revealing truths buried beneath the surface of conscious thought. In the tender embrace of sleep, we are offered glimpses of our own hearts’ desires, fears, and regrets—coded counsel from the self we so often overlook.

And perhaps that’s the most miraculous part of all: that every night, without fail, we are given a key to doors long closed, people long gone, and selves we thought we had forgotten. No passport required. No permission asked. Just a closing of the eyes… and the soft unraveling of all we dared to bury—until, for a moment, we see again what once was ours. Faithfully, Lord Nicholas Northwood