Champlain Islands, Vermont
"Are you writing your memoirs?" asks an old boy from a nearby cabin as I journal on the deck. "Close," I reply.
It's a cool. rainy morning on the first day of my vacation on this island on Lake Champlain where I have been coming for many years. I am starting the day, as I always do, by writing in my journal. I have plenty to note down, including my dream of visiting a friend who died at the end of last year in his new lodgings, a luxury apartment on the sixth floor of an Art Deco building. I was thrilled by the wall paintings depicting scenes from medieval English history, so vividly alive that they appeared to be scenes you could enter. I remember my friend's fascination with researching his ancestors in those times.
I record my dreams, and the flight of the heron who greeted me when I walked out into the day, flying north along the lake sure.
The old boy who asked about my memoirs is back again, with his wife, after eating his breakfast. "So you keep a journal?"
"It's my daily practice."
"Do you write down your dreams?"
"Every day."
"I never remember my dreams," he says wistfully. "But my wife does, sometimes."
"I dreamed of my high school principal last night," she chips in. "What's that about?"
"Well, if it were my dream, I might want to check on what's happened to my high school principal, whatever realm he's now in." The couple appear to be in their eighties, so it's a good guess that the principal is on the Other Side. I mention my own dream of my departed friend in his new digs.
"If I dreamed of my school principal", I go on ,"I would also think of the principle that this life is a classroom. At any age, we are asked to take new lessons."
"That's for sure," says the old boy. "It's a pity I don't dream, or don't remember."
"That could change tonight," I tell him. "This stuff is contagious and you have been exposed to the dream virus."
photo (c) Robert Moss
