The world next door

Because much of what the Bible describes is indetectable to natural perception, that can lend Christianity an air of unreality. The Bible describes heaven. A realm of souls and spirits. The Bible describes the world to come. A future reality that lies out of sight.

But we're ordinarily immersed in the physical, sensible world of the present, with many traces of the past. The living are sealed away in this world, like a snowglobe.

There are, however, many exceptions. And they range along a continuum. Exceptions where the supernatural breaks into our mundane existence. At one end of the continuum, an unmistakable answer to prayer or a special providence.

Further along, God speaking to a Christian in an audible voice. Or an angelic apparition. Or a Christophany. We normally experience a clockwork universe, but some Christians, or Christians sometimes, experience something reaching in from outside the clockwork universe. And this can include the activity of evil spirits.

Canonical examples include revelatory dreams and visions, where seers perceive heaven or the world to come.

However, even if we set aside the supernatural examples where there's crossover traffic, dreams are a useful reminder that our perception of reality is very compartmentalized, and what appears to be real or unreal is dramatically variable.

You can have a very vivid, tangible, detailed dream that seems to be just a real as waking experience. It can be like stepping right into another world. The world next door. It was there all along, but you can't be simultaneously conscious of both. Indeed, for the dreamer, the dreamscape seems more real because that's what he's perceiving at the time. The world outside the dream is indetectable. So there's a reversal. He's immersed in the dreamscape. A different snowglobe, sealed off from the waking world.

Of course, ordinary dreams are imaginary, although they may tap into something larger than individual human minds. The point, though, is that dreams illustrate how easy it would be for our mundane world to coexist with a supernatural realm. How what may seem to have an air of unreality is right on the other side. How easy it would be to slide back and forth between them. In that respect, dreams have great emblematic value.