Dreams are uncontrolled travels of the soul. We go to places. We can see the future in our dreams. We can go backwards and forwards. For instance, I dream many dreams. I found out that many dreams I dream are opposites of the future. If I dream about something successful, it’s a failure; and if I dream about failure, I’m always successful. Any time I remember a dream, it always comes to pass. I always forget my dreams, but any dream I remember always comes to pass. Dream is an experience the body cannot feel, only the soul. The body cannot pass through a wall. In a dream it can. In a dream you are given the opportunity to see, to feel the future. What you will be.

One must assume in such a case that the disease was already affecting her neural function and that the unconscious mind, the dreaming mind, was more sensitive to this than the waking mind. Such premonitory or precursory dreams may sometimes be happy in content and in outcome, too. Patients with multiple sclerosis may dream of remissions a few hours before they occur, and patients recovering from strokes or neurological injuries may have striking dreams of improvement before such improvement is objectively manifest. Here again, the dreaming mind may be a more sensitive indicator of neural function than examination with a reflex hammer and a pin.

Freud was a great divider. He allowed few of us to see any of the others. The central crossroads in his later life were his painting studio and Clarke’s. Everyone important to him in his final years met there.

But willfully ignoring what is true is not the same as dreaming. It’s delusion; and delusion leads to terrible decisions and, even worse, the destruction of trust.

In Composing a Life, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argued that we often shoehorn our lives into neat, linear stories of decision and then commitment: I decided to become a doctor and pursued my dream. She argues that many lives are not like that.