A Series on the Lives We Live in Dreams

Borrowed Lives

One of the earliest dreams I remember having came to me when I was very young. 

At that age, dreams didn’t feel strange or symbolic — they felt like possibilities.

In that dream, I discovered something extraordinary.

I could step into someone else’s life.

Not metaphorically, not by imagining it — but literally. If I walked into someone’s house, I would become the person who lived there. Their home would become my home. Their family would become my family. Their life would suddenly become the life I was living.

It was as if every door in the world was a doorway into another existence.

I remember moving through the dream with curiosity rather than confusion. I would enter a house and suddenly I was someone else — thinking their thoughts, living their routines, experiencing their world from the inside. Then I would leave, walk somewhere else, and step into yet another life.

At the time, it didn’t feel strange.

It felt natural.

Now, years later, I realize how fascinating that idea really is.

Even in waking life, when I sit in a public place and watch people passing by, the same thought often returns to me. Every person I see is carrying an entire world inside their life. Their own memories, struggles, routines, dreams, relationships — a whole story unfolding that I will probably never know.

We walk past hundreds of lives every day.

But we only ever get to live one.

That dream made me feel, even if just for a moment, what it might be like if that rule didn’t exist. If we could simply step into another person’s life and see the world from their side — their kitchen, their family conversations, their worries, their quiet moments.

Maybe that dream stayed with me because it touched something very human.

The quiet curiosity about other people’s lives.

Sometimes I still wonder: 

If such doors really existed — doors that let us live someone else’s life for a while — how many would we walk through?

And more importantly…

Would we eventually find our way back to our own?