Strangers Among Us.

The word stranger is defined as "someone who does not belong in the environment in which they are found". Lately I have been having those kinds of dreams that are so vivid and real, the kind that when you wake up you have remembered every single detail and every single occurrence, well, except for one thing: the people. The people in my dreams are strangers, faces that I have never seen before in my life. Where do they come from? How do we create these people in our dreams? Why are they there?

Think for a moment about your dreams. More importantly, think about the people who most often appear in your dreams. When you meet somebody new, somebody you have exchanged words with, it is only a matter of time until they appear in one of your dreams. You are conscious of who they are because you have already met them in real life. But what about when that person is somebody who you have never met? Somebody you do not recognize. Somebody totally created from the depths of your subconcious. If we have to meet somebody before we can dream about them, does that mean that these strangers are not strangers after all? I asked a friend and he seemed to believe that these "strangers" are people who we are going to meet in the future. Even more bizarre is the theory that these strangers are other dreamers that you run into while they are dreaming simultaneously (like the person who lives down the street from you).

So which holds true? ... Are these strangers in our dreams people who we are going to meet in some future, or are they people with whom we have already crossed paths? If being a stranger means you don't belong somewhere, then why do we let them in? Do we have to know someone to dream about them...or do we end up knowing them because we have once before dreamed about them?

I guess I am not surprised that the word stranger dates back to 1375 from the Old French word étrange derived from the Latin extraneus. For something to be categorized as étrange, it must be "from elsewhere, foreign, unknown, unfamiliar." A simple truth is that fear usually accompanies those things that are foreign to us. We cannot control what we do not know. Perhaps the strangers in our dreams personify all of those things that are unknown and unfamiliar to us. Until we know what was once unknown, we cannot overcome it. There are strangers among us everyday and they are not only people whom we haven't met yet...they are new feelings, new experiences, new places, new opportunities, new responsibilities, new decisiones, new challenges, and new fears. The unknown is filled with things that we have always dreamt of doing as well as the things we wish we never had to do. But in the end, it doesn't make sense to fear these strangers; it doesn't make sense to fear something we don't even know.