I don't often have dreams involving gnomes. But when I do, they seem to  be weirdly prophetic. At the very least, there is an odd  synchronicity involved  here.

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In the earliest dream that I can remember that involved gnomes, I was  travelling through a forest. For some reason, I was leading an army of "meme-makers" armed with copypastas. Suddenly, a number of gnomes appeared, each with a large bomb strapped to their backs. They shouted out the phrase "The Gnomes Are Real!" and then promptly exploded.

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It was one of many weird and nonsensical dreams I've had, and I didn't think much of it at the time.

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But then, years after this, the phrase "gnomes are real" suddenly became a meme on the Internet. I found this memetic trend rather amusing. I mean, what are the chances that I would had a dream involving memes and that phrase years prior?

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Years after this, I had another gnome dream.

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In this dream, I was traveling through a dark cavern, the rock walls of which were of a strange, deep purple color. In exploring this cavern, I came across a strange gnome. He wore orange-colored robes, and had pale, blueish skin with blank, white eyes. Perhaps he was blind?

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This gnome carried with him a staff, on the end of which was a luminous, sky-blue lantern. Talking to this gnome, he revealed that he was a "sage" and we proceeded to have a series of complex, philosophical discussions. As in most dreams, I do not remember much of the substance of the conversation I had. I do remember the gnome sage seemed to have some strange beliefs and ideas about how the world worked, which were radically counterintuitive. Notably, at a point in our conversation, the sage began to laugh at me and mock me for "believing in death." As he put it, "death is a primitive superstition," and the sage was amused and surprised that I held such an ignorant belief.

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After our conversation, I travelled further into the tunnel, and would later discover an entire civilization of these little men, deep within the purple caverns. Their cities were elaborately carved into the stalactites and stalagmites of a large, open chasm within the cave system. From the many windows and doors of these cities, the blue lights of their lanterns could be seen, lighting up their underground civilization.

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Years after this dream, I discovered that these gnomes with their blue lanterns were already a thing in the folklore of local lumberjacks, predating my dream by almost a century.

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So for the few gnome dreams that I have had, rare though they may be, the ideas contained in those dreams seem to be present elsewhere in the world.

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What does this mean?

 

I don't pretend to know, but its a weird sort of synchronicity.

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Some legends say that gnomes can communicate with us through our dreams.

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Maybe this is why the "gnomes are real" meme took off years after I had dreamt it. Perhaps I was not the only one to dream it. Perhaps the gnomes implanted this idea into our subconscious through dreams, causing them to later manifest as memes.

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Perhaps the same gnome I spoke with in my dream, with his little blue lantern, also spoke with the lumberjacks in their dreams, who spread stories of him and named him Will.

 

Or perhaps there is nothing supernatural at play here at all. Perhaps the idea of funny little men is just embedded into our human psyche. Every culture on earth has stories of gnomes. Can that truly be a coincidence, or is there something deeper there? Perhaps we are, in a sense, predisposed to believe in gnomes, leading to cross-cultural legends and gnome-believer memes alike.

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If this is the case, though, I would wonder why the image of a tiny man with a blue lantern is embedded onto the human psyche. I'm no Jungian psychologist, so I'm at a loss to explain why that would be.

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Or maybe, just maybe, the gnomes are real.