In the vast tapestry of existence, the question of time...what it is, how it behaves, and whether it even truly exists...remains one of the most profound mysteries we face. Time, in the human experience, is measured in heartbeats and sunsets, but in the language of the universe, as Einstein revealed, it is malleable, relative, and not the constant we perceive it to be. In dreams and in death...or more precisely, in the near-death encounters that peel back the veil between dimensions...we begin to glimpse that truth: that time, as we understand it, may be nothing more than an illusion cast by our limited perception.
Einstein’s "Theory of Relativity" dismantled the Newtonian ideal of time as an absolute force. Time, he taught us, slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move and how close you are to a gravitational mass. To move fast (close to the speed of light) is to age more slowly, to stretch a moment into eternity.
Stephen Hawking explained it succinctly:
“Time is relative; it can be bent, twisted, and perhaps even looped.”
If this is true in the physical world, what happens to time when consciousness is freed from the physical body?
Over four decades of studying metaphysics and near-death experiences (NDEs) have led me to understand something unsettling yet awe-inspiring: time may not exist at all in the realm beyond this one. I’ve long believed (and many NDE testimonies support this) that the closest most of us come to the threshold of death is during sleep. And it is in dreams that we find evidence for the elasticity, if not the complete dissolution, of time.
Just this morning, I experienced a dream that lasted what felt like days. Yet upon waking, only five minutes had passed. This is not unusual. It’s common for a dream to compress expansive narratives...journeys, conversations, reunions...into mere seconds of real-world time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson often reflects on this kind of experiential discrepancy when he says,
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
And perhaps dreams are a small pocket of the cosmos where our linear, waking expectations of time are suspended... just long enough to whisper a larger truth.
In that same dream, I was visited by familiar souls...friends, co-workers, fragments of a past life. I didn’t see their faces, but I felt them. I knew who they were by presence alone, as though their essence was enough to bypass the need for physical form. Over the years, I’ve had many such dreams. I’ve sensed my mother, my father, old friends now departed...not in the way we know them here, but in the way we remember how they made us feel.
Carl Sagan once suggested that:
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Perhaps in dreams, our consciousness taps into a cosmic memory bank, where recognition is not visual but vibrational.
In metaphysical studies and accounts of NDEs, this is a recurring theme: the soul, once freed from the body, does not encounter “people” in the earthly sense. It encounters essence, emotion, and recognition without form. There is often mention of "unconditional love" — a love so complete and encompassing that it defies our earthly vocabulary. That is one sensation I’ve not yet touched in my dreams. Perhaps it cannot be felt here. Perhaps this kind of love, described as “beyond words” by those who return from clinical death, exists in a frequency we are not yet built to receive.
We may live our lives longing for that kind of love...to feel it, to give it. Yet this world, for all its beauty, is a dense one. It has rules, restrictions, and rhythms we must obey. It demands a currency of time and a cost of survival. But I suspect (no, I believe) that one purpose of our journey here is to learn to create pockets of that unconditional love. To plant heaven in the soil of earth. And perhaps, through compassion and connection, to stretch moments into timeless meaning.
Time, after all, is not linear in dreams. Nor is it linear in the universe. Physicists speak of "non-locality" and "entanglement," and in the realm of "zero-point energy," we encounter the idea that even in a perfect vacuum, there exists an infinite quantum hum...a sea of potential, energy vibrating just below detection. It is not unreasonable to consider that consciousness, once detached from the limits of the body, may swim in that same ocean. Hawking himself theorized that "information is never truly lost," even in the crushing grip of a black hole. What, then, happens to the information encoded in the soul?
Einstein famously said,
“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
If so, then every goodbye we say in this life is not the end, but a temporary displacement. Those we’ve lost are not gone. They are waiting in a realm where presence needs no face, and time needs no clock. And in our dreams, we are sometimes given permission to visit.
I used to journal these dreams religiously, noting the timestamps, tracking the hours. Some nights, I’d awaken having lived out entire stories (four, five, even six narratives) within the span of a single hour. The patterns were unmistakable. What felt like weeks or months in dreamtime had occurred while my physical body rested for less than a coffee break. That was all the evidence I needed to understand: in the space beyond waking life, we are not tethered to chronology. We are swimming in a timeless sea, visiting, learning, remembering.
So when we speak of the soul’s journey, of what lies beyond, perhaps we should stop thinking in terms of hours and years. Instead, think in terms of gravity and frequency, energy and essence. “We are stardust,” Sagan said, “a way for the cosmos to know itself.” And as stardust, maybe we are not so different from photons...particles that, once freed from the pull of mass, can travel at the speed of light and live in a present that never ends.
Time may be our master here. But only here. Beyond this earthly veil, beyond sleep, beyond the heartbeat of death, there exists a universe where the soul is unbound, where memory has muscle, and where love (pure and omnipresent) may finally speak without words. And in that silence, we remember what we always were.
Timeless.
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