Dream Mappers

For your reading pleasure, a writing exercise. This morning I had a horrible case of writer's block. After what seemed like hours of nothingness, I did what I am sure my mother would have recommended I do-- I applied some essential oils to my wrists and the back of my neck. Then I laid in bed for approximately 45 minutes and just tried to clear my mind. Just before I got up, I was thinking the mantra, "as a writer, it is my job to build a bridge between the logic of the world and the logic of dreams." Where did that line come from? I do not know, but it was very helpful in getting this writing exercise done.

“When I’m dreaming, certain things make a kind of logical sense—but as soon as I wake up, the whole dream-structure of logic just collapses, it falls apart.”

“Yes, yes, that is very common.”

“A long time ago, I decided to give up trying to ‘understand’ my dreams. The whole business is just too frustrating for a rational thinker like me.”

“Many of our clients describe themselves as rational thinkers, Mr. Walker. Seeking to understand a dream is a rational pursuit; rational people seek to understand each aspect of their lives. And here at Dream Mappers we help our clients build a bridge between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness.”

Miss Sonari (at least, that was how she had identified herself over the phone) spoke in a quiet voice that at once calmed and unsettled Donovan Walker. Donovan imagined her sitting cross-legged in a dark, candle-lit room in the Midwest, perhaps surrounded by tarot cards and small trays of incense. He knew that in reality, she was probably sitting at a desk, reading from a Dream Mappers call center script while assessing how much she could charge him for an initial consultation.

The phrase, rational people seek to understand each aspect of their lives—the phrase was so good, it must have been canned. Yet, Donovan could not help turning it over in his mind—when he dismissed dreams as not worth understanding, had he dismissed along with that an entire sphere of undiscovered logic?

“In wakefulness,” Miss Sonari continued, “we are instructed on how to behave, speak, think. Are you an educated man, Mr. Walker?”

“Yes, I hold a master’s degree in engineering,” Donovan paused, and then continued, “I read often, books, newspapers, blogs. I have traveled to many places in the world. I do consider myself to be educated in the many ways one might come to be educated.”

“When you travel, do you travel alone?”

An odd question, Donovan thought. He could not anticipate where Miss Sonari was going with her questions, so, intrigued, he answered, “When I was in college, I used to travel with my friends—sometimes there were five or ten of us. But lately, I have preferred to travel alone. And I prefer to travel to places off the beaten track—the towns that are not accessible by railroad, the ruins that have not yet been restored. Why do you ask?”

“When Columbus discovered the Americas, he was with a crew of men. It was also known that thousands of native people already occupied the Americas, meaning, Columbus did not so much ‘discover’ the Americas, as he was among one of the first Europeans to disembark on her shores. Still, we love to imagine that one man single-handedly discovered two continents over eighty times the size of Spain.”

As Miss Sonari talked about Columbus, the strange aura that had cloaked her voice lifted. Donovan wondered if she worked at Dream Mappers part-time and studied history at the local state college part-time. He wanted to ask her, but she still had not made her point, so he tabled the question and waited for her to continue.

“We revere the lone hero. We have been trained to revere the lone hero. So it makes sense that you have developed a taste for traveling alone and for exploring the supposedly unexplored. Society has made you this way—has made us this way.”

“So, what you’re trying to tell me, Miss Sonari, is that my sensibilities, beliefs, values are nothing more than societal constructs?” Donovan had read his Nietzsche, his Foucault, his philosopher-of-doom just like the next college-aged disciple of truth, and he was getting impatient with Miss Sonari. Now he was sure that she was nothing more than a college student piecing together lines from a script with tidbits she had picked up from her professors. “Look, this isn’t anything I haven’t heard before. I was mistaken when I called Dream Mappers, and I am sorry for wasting your time.”

Donovan was about to hang up the phone, but being a generally polite man, he waited for Miss Sonari to say goodbye. Instead, what followed was a thirty-second period of silence, and then, “are you still on the line, Mr. Walker?”

“Yes,” Donovan responded reluctantly. He suddenly felt foolish for waiting for her to say goodbye. She was not a relative or business associate, not even an acquaintance; she was more like an automated operator than a human at this point, and he probably should have just ended the call.

“You are a rational man, Mr. Walker, but you have been recently troubled by a recurring dream. It is a dream so disturbing to you that after dismissing the logic of dreams for so many years, you have decided to call us here at Dream Mappers today, at 5:30 in the morning, for help deciphering your dream.”

Miss Sonari’s voice again became calm and quiet. The way she spoke, it wasn’t something you found in a call center script. “Please forgive me if I came off as pretentious earlier, Mr. Walker. What I wanted to tell you was that society trains us to interpret symbols in one way, but dreams, dreams are private, and teach us all our own individual brand of logic.”

Donovan lit up the screen of his digital alarm clock. It was now 5:53 AM, approximately thirty minutes until sunrise. “I have been having a recurring dream,” he said. Scenes from the dream began to flash in his mind, and he recalled how he suddenly woke up at 4:33 in the morning, on the ground beside his bed, with one arm fully extended under the bed, as if trying to grab hold of something just out of reach.

Miss Sonari was silent, and something about her silence struck Donovan as genuine. “Let me tell you about it.”

A bird flies over the Grand Canyon, a national park as dream inspiring as any.