Putting a Stopper in the Dream Door

Do your dreams fly away like fireflies escaping from a jar, as you leave the fields of dreaming? Here's a game I invented for catching lost dreams.

Picture a door to your dream world.

When you return from a dream excursion, you step through this door, back into your body in the bed.

Often, as you come back, you have dreams fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used as a boy to catch fireflies on summer nights.

But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They swirl away through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.

Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a door stopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. Close it must, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.

But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.

When I did this in an initial experiment, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. As I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.

I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.

I brought back three dreams that had flown off before, one of them quite spicy.

I noticed that the black dog I had stationed at the door to hold it ajar was now bigger and even more noble: a guardian, not merely a stopper.