“How wonderful that we have met this paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
~ Niels Bohr, “Pioneer of the Atom,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 20 Oct 1957
Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr went so far as to admit that the notion of “things unobservable”… that is, things invisible, immaterial… being “real,” was a perfectly logical outcome, just as Shakespeare referred to there being more things in heaven and earth than in all of humanity’s philosophies by way of Hamlet to Horatio. Egads!… creating, perhaps, a hypothetical bridge, if one chooses to see it, between the playwright and the physicist leading to a belief in the reality of a hitherto unknown road connecting us to unknown worlds, parallel universes?
We dream in metaphor, read in metaphor, we even hear in metaphor. Was that the night wind in a hollow tree?… or the wail of a wandering wraith in search of a home? … that sort of thing. It surrounds us and invites us to see beyond the surface of things. It expresses
the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. In the classroom I often describe such literary figurative comparisons as a “meta-door,” that is, a great door that leads you into the Great Beyond… the power to identify and interpret metaphor being the key that unlocks that supra-natural door. Which makes perfectly logical sense given the etymology of the word “metaphor,” as it comes to us from the Greek metapherein meaning “to transfer,” or, more literally, “to carry something beyond;” from meta (beyond) + pherein (to bear or carry). Metaphor transports us to the hidden places behind the veil of observable reality.
Consider one of Shakespeare’s most famous metaphors: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.” [As You Like It, Act II, scene vii] One might suggest that Jacques’ famous speech does indeed compare life with theater, but, perhaps, with a theological twist: that we are living in accordance with “stage directions” preordained by God, who is, like playwright Shakespeare in the audience at The Globe, observing the drama He’s created as it unfolds. A more common sociological interpretation draws attention to the way we act and present ourselves differently when we are with different people, thus different 
audiences. Either way, it speaks of some kind of relationship between the place where the authorship begins and the temporal action occurs.
At any rate, reading this Shakespearean metaphor instantly conjures up thoughts of the greater metaphysical realities humming immediately behind the written words: pointing us either toward the questions surrounding the interaction between Divine Providence and the creatures affected, or a reflection of how we behave in the midst of human social discourse. Either way, both, as I see it, direct us toward the existence of magical doorways, if you will, that allow us, through somewhat hidden points of access, to understand the greater, highly abstract concepts and ideas and/or phenomena, lurking about, behind the surface, more clearly. If so, there may be no endpoint in sight for such the potential to better understand things eternal.
With metaphorical thinking, we shift our entire frame of reference to create connections between something over here and something else, over there… a conceptual inter-dimensional shift between existing paradigms. Or, perhaps, between existing worlds.
Thinking metaphorically opens our eyes to see the similarities between dissimilar things, which is a trait of creative thinking… innovative thought being powered by the imagination… with imagination being the vehicle of transport as well as the subject of the next column…
“For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.”
~ Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
The Kingdom of Memory 