Dreams

I know people who claim they never dream, but I can't imagine a writer who doesn't. Writers deal in dreams, and, as a consequence, I suspect that they dream differently than normal people; they spend so much time inside their own heads that things are bound to be a bit bizarre in there. The solutions that writers seek nearly always come from some deeper resource pool that can often be tapped only after a good (or bad) night's sleep. When you wake in the morning to find the plot solution or word association that eluded you the previous day there awaiting your order, you can bet that during the night, your dream-self went rummaging back through the dusty attic of your subconscious to retrieve it. You may or may not remember the dream, but the night shift has probably put in a good day's work to have it ready for you when you woke.

Most of my best dreams occur in the hour or so just before I arise in the morning, when I meander back and forth across the border between sleep and wakefulness. It is a fertile dream time for me, and I find that my mind sometimes likes to play semi-erotic word association games. A few years ago, in this pre-awakening state, I suddenly found the word "virgin" intruding insistently into my dream thoughts. The word floated in and out through the open jalousies of my mind like a white butterfly. Every time I shooed it outside, and tried to resume my journey toward consciousness, the darn thing would sneak back through a side window and dance white and tantalizing there before me, obscuring everything else. Suddenly, as if to neutralize the confounded thing, another word, a brown furry word, sprang in through a window and grabbed the white apparition in mid air; they fell heavily to the floor in front of me and lay there writhing and struggling, as if demanding my attention, insisting that I recognize some association between the two of them. The other word was "infallible". I was puzzled. Why had these two words juxtaposed themselves in my morning reveries? Then, by changing the spelling, I saw the relationship, and almost laughed aloud in my sleep. The relationship went like this: virgin = inphallible.

Another time, I was again making my hazy way up toward the light, when I saw hundreds of plastic breasts, such as department store manikins have, raining down before me. There was nothing gruesome or particularly erotic about the scene, it just kept forcing itself into my thoughts, insisting that I notice it. I struggled with the meaning of this vision for a while, and was getting nowhere with it when the word "bra" flashed into my mind and established the connection that I had seemingly been tasked to find: bra = breast pockets.

I am one of those who, from time to time, records dreams in a journal. I don't get them all, for dreams are vaporous wispy things that vanish quickly in the light, and sometimes they evaporate before I can capture them on paper. I tend to be cranky on those days when a good dream has escaped.

On five occasions, astounding secrets have been revealed to me in dreams--secrets so profound that I knew immediately I had been given the keys to the universe. On each of these occasions it was as if a rainbow appeared in the heavens with the Universal Answer to Everything writ large across it. I felt overwhelming joy, amazement, and relief that the solution to all of life's problems and mysteries was so simple and obvious. The fear that I would not be able to remember the revealed truth in the morning roused me from the dream just long enough to scribble it on a pad beside the bed. I then plunged happily back to sleep, knowing that when I woke I would save the world.

I have kept the five secrets in my journal for years now, and periodically I go back and review them. Something happened between the time I saw and understood everything in the dream, and the time I awoke to find the cryptic messages scrawled on the bedside note pad--the simple and obvious meanings that so excited me in the dreams evaporated in the daylight. I still ponder the messages from time to time, and occasionally I catch glimpses of the shadowy meanings behind them, but I cannot quite make them out, and I cannot figure out how to apply them. The gods giveth and the gods taketh away.

As a service to mankind, here are the five great cosmic secrets of the universe, as revealed to me in dreams. Maybe you can figure them out and save the world--but you'd better hurry. Time is running out.

• Ones and nudes are palaces.
• The Bedlam Duchy.
• Twenty-seven thousand dozen puck appointments.
• Bits o' bars and bite buckets.
• They live like Seikhs in shacks that leak like sieves.

Don't ask me.