Stamp of reality

 "Where have you been?" He glares at me, hurt and angry. How could I have missed the big event? He slew or tamed the monster - I missed the story - just before his 12th birthday. As everyone knows this is the very best time for adventures of initiation. His birthday party became a public triumph. I can see the evidence in ribbons and exploded fireworks in the square.

How can I explain to him that we don't live in the same country? I only visit in dreams and miss out on the action when I'm away. If I tell him this he will think I am crazy, just as people in the country where I will record this over coffee will think me mad if I tell them that I travel to a land where hydras and dragons are as real as traffic lights and Ubers.

I mutter something like, "I had business on a far island. I sailed on a two-masted schooner."

I give him a postage stamp with a picture of a two-masted schooner. It slipped out of the pages of a French novel overnight. He is mollified. What boy does not love stamps from far places? Uh-oh.There is a discrepancy. The schooner in the picture is three-masted. But in the world of the novel from which it sailed, with no need of an outer wind, it is une goélette à deux mâts. Two-masted. This is important. The author inists on it again and again. Perhaps the boy won't notice. However,it is precisely the kind of thing that won't pass the scrutiny of a 12-year-old with a love of adventure.

If you are curious about the back story of the French novel that came to me via a friend's dream, you will find it here. What I have shared on this page is of course a jeu d'esprit. However, I did meet that boy monster slayer in a dream before dawm today. Embarrassed by the difficulty of explaining that I don't live in his country all the time, I did reach to the novel (L'agent de change by Jacques Bellefroid) to fumble an answer to his question.

I was reading the French novel in the early hours, my favorite time for intimacy with books. When I turned in at 4:00 a.m., the narrator had not yet realized that the unusual postage stamp commemorates Joseph Conrad (born Józef Korzeniowski). Conrad became a master of English prose despite that fact that English was  not only not his native tongue but, as I recall, the third language he learned.

On the Trail of My Bookish Dream Double

I am constantly tryng to keep up with my traveling dream self. A friend in Europe recently reported a dream in which he visited a Paris bookshop and leafed through an interesting novel about dreams and reality titled L'agent de change. He left the bookstore without purchasing the book. When he mentioned this to my double, in his dream, Dream Robert reprimanded him for not buying the book.

After waking, he went online and discovered that there is a novel called L'agent de change with similar content to the one he looked over in his dream. The author is a veteran French writer with an interesting name, Jacques Bellefroid ("Beautiful Cold").

Well, of course I could not refuse a book recommendation from my dream self. I ordered the novel and it arrived today. There is a mystery involving a tiny picture of a schooner (goélette) on a postage stamp that starts sailing on a lively sea when the narrator looks at it. The writing is spare and crisp and doesn't make me go to the dictionary often. So I'll add it to my current reading. I smiled when I came to these lines:

On me dit que les écrivains ont peur de la page blanche. Grâce à Dieu, je ne suis pas écrivain

"I am told that writers are scared of the blank page. Thank God I am not a writer."

Agent de change means "stockbroker" in French, and that is the narrator's profession. He thinks his job requires him to "trust in only quantifiable things that keep him at a distance from dreams and surprises ". We can be sure the author was conscious of the double entendre in his title.

Everything changes in the stockbroker's perception of reality when he sees and feels the spray bursting over the stem of the two-masted schooner in the ocean of a postage stamp he was given by his wife, who sees nothing except a pretty picture.

Reading in Dreams: Don't trust any of those dream researchers who tell you that you can't read in dreams. Nonsense. I read as much in my dreams as in regular life, that is to say, enormously. While I may sometimes bring back only a few lines or just a title (of books that may or may not exist in regular life) I can sometimes bring through several pages. My friend was reading, too, in that Paris bookshop,and brought back a title and a summary of content.