The desk in the mountains

I am walking from room to room in my house with books and papers, trying to find the right place to settle in order to embark on important new work. I realize the solution is very simple: I'll go back to my desk. It's a huge desk, but it's usually covered with stuff. When I sit down now, however, much of the surface is clear. I notice a little black Moleskine notebook that vanished many months ago.

     I feel extraordinarily comfortable, yet also ready for adventure, almost as if the desk is the control panel of a starship and we are about to take off. I look up and gasp with amazement and delight. In front of me, the wall of the room has vanished. I am looking into a marvelous vista of forested hills and mountains. Everything is green and verdant, full of the juice of spring. I am right there, in the midst of the mountains, as if my desk is on an overhang.

I woke from this dream this morning feeling wonderful, ready to plunge into new projects. But first, I needed to honor the dream on a literal level by clearing space on my desk. As I moved things around my writing Cave, I unearthed the little Moleskine notebook, and with it a box of "floppy" disks that had been missing for even longer, and had evaded my periodic - and sometimes urgent - archeological digs. The retrieval of the floppies was a great find, since they contain journal entries and story drafts I had not saved on my current hard drive or flash drive.

     Our dream adventures may be grand narrative roller coasters, or long-running sitcoms, or multi-storeyed houses of the psyche; some of my dream reports run for pages and pages of single-spaced type. Yet sometimes the most helpful dreams come through as a vignette, a fragment, or just a single word or phrase. Less can be more, in this as in other things. A simple image may provide a vital clue, and when it stands alone there is less risk of blurring the focus. If we want more, we can use even the tiniest fragment as a fisherman uses a rod, to reel in larger creatures from the dream sea. More than any specific content, the great gift of certain dreams is the energy they can convey. My dream of the desk in the mountains left me full of juice, ready to work and create - and even to clean up my office!

     I am reminded of an observation by my favorite writer on dreams before the modern era, who just happened to be a bishop of the early church. In his tractate "On dreams" (De insomniis), written on his estate in North Africa around 405, Synesius wrote that in dreams God makes us "fruitful with his own courage." Yes. Dreaming helps us to bear fruit, with vital strength from a deeper source.