Some of the first dreams I ever had as a child were of planets and 'space bodies' much closer than they appear now. I don't think they were of our
system's planets, but there were a few in the sky - one was very close, so close that not all of it could be seen. I also remember the skies were
busy with spacecraft, which I assumed at the time were aliens. It looked to me like they had taken over and changed the entire planet. This dream
occurred repeatedly and felt very real.
In another recurring dream I experienced an alien invasion where they came and seemingly 'flipped the lights on' and began taking us in droves.
While this went on the sky was black yet everything was illuminated with a flat, diffuse, and indirect lighting (slightly brighter than a cloudy day,
but no real observable shadows). There were no stars, and the Sun was nowhere to be seen. The world was silent. There was no wind. Everything felt
damp and dark. That realistic and utterly unsettling dream/vision eventually led to the creation of this short story -
These Dark Worlds.
I also had a dream the night before Kurt Cobain died that a massive earthquake split the US in half, a volcano erupted in the west, and the ocean
crept inland to engulf 2/3 of the mainland (oddly enough it had nothing to do with Kurt Cobain). Anyway I've had that dream 2 other times since
then.
These dreams, while experiencing them, certainly felt as though it was another reality. Not necessarily the future but another time, another place.
Possibly the future or the distant past. By far the most real and horrid dream was the one of the blackened sky, I'll never get over that.