A poet might thus conclude time is elastic, multidimensional. Time might actually be a two-way street, if not a circular drive, with patterns repeating and the past bleeding into the present. An adult bitten by a dog during childhood may find it terrifying today to be charged by a barking off-leash dog (with the owner invariably gushing breezily, “Oh, don’t worry, he’s friendly!”).

Likewise, entire societies tend not to forget the injustices and humiliations of the past, real or imagined. In his superb book “Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends,” the historian Lonnie Johnson argues that history haunts Central Europeans. For example, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, though not immediately leading to the collapse of the Serbian state at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, became a pillar of Serbian myth-making. The notion of defeat and subsequent sense of oppression at the hands of the Ottomans fed into a nationalist rhetoric 600 years later as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Johnson suggests that this festering, centuries-long resentment played a significant role in the Balkan wars and massacres of the 1990s.

Humans seem mysteriously influenced as much by conjuring up the past — imagined or not — as by the material reality of the present. If the capacity to imagine is a mystery, dreams are the great mystery within the imagination. Perhaps the most foundational modern text for interpreting dreams is the “The Interpretation of Dreams,” published in 1899 by the Austrian psychologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Freud was not without his detractors then, and many of his assumptions have been roundly criticized today. But his notion of an unconscious mind — an internal world not directly controlled by our waking self — continues to influence the approach to interpreting the human psyche. Freud felt that dreams could lead people into the future as a form of wish fulfillment, that fulfillment was also part of the present, and that in “every sense a dream has its origins in the past.” You could say that dreams thrive on a circular notion of time, bundling past, present and future into one enigmatic package needing interpretation.

These interpretations often take surprising twists. A friend once shared a story of serving as a juror on a Brooklyn murder trial. The jurors quickly and unanimously found the defendant guilty. They decided to sleep on the decision. But overnight one juror dreamed that an angel appeared and whispered that the defendant was innocent. The juror then voted not guilty, and the result was a hung, or deadlocked, jury.

Everyday dreams are an invitation to explore. Perhaps you have puzzling dreams that bubble up from the past, like some psychic artesian well. For me, dream-choked nights are common. There are the repetitive dreams, like a numbing streaming series episode where nothing gets resolved. In one version, I feverishly pump gas all night long at the garage where I worked during high school, serving an endless stream of cars idling exhaust into a cold starry sky. Then there’s the dream where my father, long deceased from Alzheimer’s, appears, angrily demanding to know where his books and tools are. Perhaps you’ve wakened, exhausted, from a similarly troubling dream or nightmare.

Soothing dreams are better! Awakening from one is special, and is often accompanied by wishing to return to that blissful state, like the enslaved Caliban in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Yearning for the freedom found in his dream, Caliban wistfully says, “When I waked, I cried to dream again.” Such dreams can be an invitation to imagine a better future or reconcile with the past.

Other times the dreamer awakens into a liminal space, unsure whether they’re awake or still dreaming. Literature often explores this frontier between the waking and dream worlds. In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the reconciled lovers return astonished from the forested fairy world, wondering if “yet we sleep, we dream.” This correspondence between dream and wakefulness intrigued Freud, who, as Shakespeare scholar and WSU English professor David Hartwig notes, was “fascinated by Shakespeare and drew many of his psychoanalytical ideas from Shakespeare’s plays and characters.” In turn, I find it fascinating how characters’ dreams stretch across centuries to still influence us today as we read or watch a play.

Next time you dream — and can remember the dream — ponder the meaning. Perhaps there’s a message that may change your life or someone else’s. Or perhaps the magic of the dream is its own reward, much like contemplating a cloud slipping across the sky, hoping for insight but not expecting an answer.

Hal Crimmel is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of English who served for nine years as chair of the English department at Weber State University. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.