I awoke the other day worried. Not about an appointment I’d forgotten, a task left undone, geopolitics, my health or Trump. No, I came awake feeling alarm that I hadn’t heard from my grandmother for a long time, and thinking I’d better call to make sure she was alright.

And then, the cobwebs cleared, the world of sleep and dreams was replaced with daylight and consciousness and I realized there was no need to call. My grandmother died in 1986 at the age of ninety-six. That went a long way toward explaining why I hadn’t heard from her lately.

But the whole episode was a reminder of how rich and strange the winding stairs, grand salons and ballrooms and back passageways of our mind are. For a moment, my grandmother still lived. And when I came fully awake there was, for a moment, a fresh pang of sorrow. It was as if I had just learned again that she had died.

Similarly, when my mother was diagnosed with the recurrence of cancer that killed her, I began to have vivid dreams in which she was either already dead or a much younger version of herself, night after night. Those imprinted on us are there forever, apparently. And, in the subterranean parts of the mind where they live, time and death do not exist and lose their brute power.

It’s easy to see how this property of our gray matter could have been the origin of beliefs in ghosts and shades, omens and hauntings. No doubt my worry about my grandmother would once have been regarded as a spectral visitation or a proof of an afterlife. Or my dreams of my mother dead could have been taken as the black magic power that killed her.

Freud’s generalizations got a lot wrong, perhaps overly influenced by the particular neuroses and obsessions of his particular clientele in the particular time and place of his fin de siècle Vienna, but he was surely a pioneer in identifying the difference between the conscious mind and the unconscious and the contradictory ways they strive to make sense of the world.

It is no accident that his work teems with allusions to the dreamscape or literature with its archetypal characters acting our unconscious dramas. Oedipus, Hamlet, Moses and the rest. And it is interesting that the latest thinking in psychology, that informs behavioral economics, returns to the notion that our rational (or rationalizing) mind is really a thin veneer over the deeps where irrational, metaphoric, imaginary, magical thinking hold sway.

This was scary enough when we lived in feuding tribes armed with stones and myths. In a world of nuclear arms and global warming, what dreamscapes inhabit the brains of jihadis, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump must give us pause.

In my subconscious, I still am alive to my mother’s resentments and disappointments, my father’s equable temperament and quiet decency, my grandmother’s endurance and sheltering embrace. Without thinking about them, I am anxious to live up to their expectations or sorry for not having understood the wellsprings of their behavior better.

In our civic life, whose voices are our leaders hearing in their heads, what archetypes haunt their dreams, what myths are they reenacting? Our Enlightenment founding fathers tried to construct a system that would allow our rational parts to rule and hedge against the monsters from the id that they well understood. Is their Eighteenth-Century mechanism up to an era that scorns the superego and all other umpires? We must hope so.

Shakespeare, who knew everything about the minds of frail humans, said, ‘The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.’ But bodied forth in action, dreams can have real, daylight consequences. Not for nothing did Freud say: “Where id was, there shall ego be.” But this was less a guarantee than a hope, less a promise than a prayer, more a prescription for self-knowledge than a prediction of an improved human race. Under the advanced degrees and bespoke tailoring, we are still dangerous, irrational, superstitious apes.