The Butterfly Is Watching: Dream Realities and Strange Watchers

Earlier, I was rewatching the wonderful Hugh Grant film Heretic while finishing up a client assignment. I found my imagination lingering on the moment Mr. Reed brings up Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream — the ancient Daoist anecdote where a man dreams he's a butterfly, only to wake and wonder if perhaps he’s actually a butterfly dreaming he's a man. 

It’s a simple story on the surface, but it echoes in a way that’s hard to shake. Especially at this point in my life.

As I sometimes do when watching movies, I also started messing around on Midjourney and quickly wound up with a series of surreal butterflies on my hands. 

One in particular stayed with me — dark, elegant wings speckled with pale bands, and at its center a single, all-seeing eye. Not painted or decorative but real, watching, and sentient. That eye made me feel like I wasn’t just looking at the butterfly. It was also looking back at me from God only knows where.

Zhuangzi’s dream isn’t about confusion 

It’s about reality as a question and a concept, not a conclusion. We tend to think of life in absolutes –– waking vs. sleeping, real vs. unreal, human vs. non-human. But what if those categories aren’t as fixed as they've always seemed? What if a dream isn’t the opposite of life, but simply another expression of it?

What if some part of us — the part that just might be ancient, instinctive, unblinking — is always dreaming?

The butterfly from my render feels reflective of that part of me. Not the transitory flicker of beauty most people associate with transformation, but something older. It's a witness, a seer. Maybe it's even one of the animal guides I've been thinking so much about lately.

Lately, I feel like I’m standing between two worlds

One of these worlds I'm all too familiar with. It's the one that asks for resumes, recommends routines, and demands hard proof of absolutely everything. It only asks me to show up — not to shine, not to share, not to become. But I have so much more to bring than just presence. 

I find that world disorienting and always have. 

Then there are the days I have time to write in a trance or contemplate the bigger mysteries of life. When I'm lucky, the right words come from somewhere that doesn’t feel like me –– the second world. 

Returning from that world feels like haunting my own house, drifting through rooms that no longer recognize me.

So when I see an image like this butterfly with its wings stretched wide while it watches from a place beyond time, it feels like a message. Or maybe just a reminder. Is some other version of me dreaming this life? And if so, why this life and this imagery? 

In spiritual work, there’s a concept called the “watcher self"

This is the version of you that observes your thoughts without attachment. Maybe that’s the butterfly. The one who flits from realm to realm, unbothered by binaries like truth or illusion, because it no longer believes in them. That butterfly knows both its wings belong to the same body.

Or maybe the butterfly is God. Or the soul. Or the quiet hum of consciousness itself, resting on a branch we can’t quite reach. Maybe the dream is just as important as the waking. Maybe they need each other because they only exist in contrast to one another. Maybe they are each other.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. 

* This freewriting exercise is part of this month's incarnation of the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar deep dive into identity and self-expression in all their many forms.