When I go to bed my mother leaves the door to my bedroom open. A hall light shines and the light comes into my room, over the smooth, orange wood of the door that faces the bed. To my right are windows with white curtains and red trim. My parents’ voices—perhaps the television—come to me muffled through the walls that separate us. Sometimes I go into see them, after bedtime, to complain that I cannot sleep. “Close your eyes,” my mother says. In my room I look at things and invent stories about people I would like to become. I close my eyes and follow threads of some narrative that interweave again and again.

Once I endured a period of what I considered to be nightmares. This was perhaps near the time in my life when I discovered the word “midnight,” a sublunary and mysterious word that gave me an impression of dark blue laced with black. When I would close my eyes in the darkness of bedtime I practiced elaborate narrative rituals designed to delay sleep and to keep far away whatever nightmares I certainly felt I would have.

A Sunday school teacher gently pointed out to me at this time that I possessed a certain power to confront the monsters and bad things that populated my dreams. She said to step right up to the things I feared in my dreams and to say that they had no power over me. She spoke, I could tell, in earnest, and I believed her.

In the spring a shrub of spirea would rustle next to my window as the wind blew gently at night and I lay trying to wind myself down for the inevitable coming of sleep. I listened to the wind scratch the window with the little branches and white flowers and finally drifted into my dreams. Perhaps my Sunday school teacher’s yoga had some power indeed, for I do not recall another episode of nightmares. Only, on occasion, did the contents of my dreams match the intensity of waking life. The dream world instead became a kind of resting place. Images came, whatever they were, and I was just another occupant of the dream until morning.

Only recently have I noticed again how the intensity of dream makes claims at times on other precious psychic resources. Remembering my Sunday school teacher’s words—or perhaps those words have been refreshed by a more recent magazine article—I have somehow begun to step out of my dreams into another place, as though the images arrive as a wedge between me and some other alien substance. It’s hard to describe. I observe the pace of the day and perform its quiet rituals: make the bed; play chess with my sons; sweep the floor. And yet it seems as though simultaneous to these dreams other stories are being formed beyond my conscious narratives. But when I dream it isn’t me but that boy—or perhaps all the people I have been and no longer can be—sharing still in the images we have gathered over to watch with great scrutiny. What do we tell each other I wonder? And how do we train ourselves to be still in the dark and observant, instead of fearful, of things that go “bump”?

These dreams have no portent: I don’t seek their omens or believe such things presage future events. Some other transport—some intimate communion—takes place. Even now the memory of myself in bed, the hall light flooding one side of my room, arrives in dreamlike waves that can only be partially grasped. And yet, those years of going to bed composed an eternity, too.

To walk around inside a dream is to discover ways of telling a story. It’s not your story, though it is, quite certainly, you who are called on as its witness.

There is a photograph of Carl Jung, taken by Aniela Jaffé during the final year of his life. In it he holds in his left hand a candle while behind him Lake Zürich disappears against the horizon. This great dreamer focuses his gaze upon the camera, and I have thought often of this—how he was so compelled by images. And here he is absorbed by his own imaginary, the picture contributing to the circulation of narrative about him. The candle motivates a story in miniature of a life nearing completion. The brevity of that spark shining into the camera lens freezes it. The lake absorbs this light, and the rush of things continues.