I was in a bar last week with a stranger who I had never met before and will maybe never see again. We talked about Jeff Buckley and Liz Fraser’s All Flowers in Time Turn Towards the Sun, and their brief romance, about the ephemeral nature of intense connections, and of life happening in the wrong order. How we got there is vague. They had to get up early the following morning and leave the country for a new life overseas; I had to go back to teaching. We left with a sense of commonality about being in the world that felt life-affirming. So we said our goodbyes and wished each other the best.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about dreamscapes (if you have read Drifting North, you’ll know it plays a bit with two things at the end about dreamscapes and what they allow us to do), which links straight into what I’m reading right now, namely the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano’s Dreams and Time. Zambrano was exiled from Spain under Franco and had an itinerant existence that took her to France and across the Americas, which is perhaps one reason she became so interested in dreams and the inner life of the subconscious, where Spain still belonged to its exiles and one day might again.

In Dreams and Time, Zambrano makes a key point about how waking time allows action because it contains a future, whereas dream-time largely removes this freedom but emancipates us in other ways. The dreamer cannot normally interrupt the dream and choose another future (though therapists do use practices that allow people to divert and channel subconscious urges in trauma patients, which I did after brain injury), but in dream-time we are not bound by the forces of the physical world. We can be lying in bed with the person we were in love with at 26 and then be at a childhood party and then at our own funerals in the space of seconds in the real world.

One of the key points that Zambrano makes is that these things are not illegitimate, or simply there to be interpreted on a couch. The bigger truth is that the dream world allows us to see how much of our experience of the self in the waking world is governed by its timescapes which—if you go away and read some theoretical physics—are also arbitrary in their own ways, even as they remain real according to the rules of the reality we awaken into

It’s a truism of climate change that it is not a problem for ‘nature’, but an issue for human timescapes. Sure enough, a lot of species may be wiped out and a large number of landscapes transformed completely, but nature evolves and will remain intact. It is a problem of human time in which we have increasingly drawn ourselves onto the dream track, where time folds together. It seems inescapable even as it grows more surreal. But this isn’t the most interesting thing about the way Zambrano imagines time.

The sensation of time coming together in illogical but intensive episodes that shouldn’t follow is not confined only to the dream world. Throughout our lives, we indulge in and experience dream-time. You can still be in the bar talking about All Flowers in Time and carry it with you. You can carry love, shame, regret, hope, and much else. A whole world can change in a week, or a few seconds, and then begins a long, drawn-out process of memory management that turns it into formal, logical time. That has lessons for crisis, and for recovery, and for learning to pass through.

And, given that permission to grow, all flowers in time turn towards the sun.