Why “not real” doesn’t mean “meaningless.” (Issue #448) Base Image: From “The Spirit of the Plays of Shakspeare” by Frank Howard, 1827, via the British Library / Wikimedia Commons. Dreams are a near-universal human experience — but who are they actually for? In a recent overview of James Hilman’s The Dream and the Underworld , Jack Preston King shares the argument that our dreams do not actually belong to us.