As Lucid as They Come

I generally don’t write about dreams. They rarely stick around beyond the peripheral memory of the first hour of wakefulness. Looking directly at them, they vanish, seem silly, are not worth trying to put into words.

Last night’s dream, I’m sorry to say, is of this same disappearing variety. But it was powerfully different in quality from most while it lasted. I have the feel of it yet, almost a taste, somewhere in my synapses.

I had some control over where this dream went, as if I were behind the movie camera. The script seemed to arise out of my writer’s mind, and it lead to streams of easy words about whatever was on center stage at the time. It seems to have been at least lubricated by the 15 minutes of the Prairie Home Companion movie we watched last night while eating dinner.

I was back stage with my camera and microphone, and it casted by people I know or knew, people I have met in dreams or books before, and fully fictional characters that had no place to come from my own imagination. The dialogue between them was amazing. I both heard it, and wrote it for them to say.

I would never use the terms “intellectually stimulating” or “exhilarating” to describe 999 dreams out of a thousand. But this one was both. Perhaps, a portent of things to come. Perhaps, nothing but a dream.