ONCE—IT WAS SO LONG AGO NOW I don’t really remember, but let’s say I was in my midtwenties, living in a house on the banks of a white-water river in rural Oregon, the house I still live in—I had a dream. I’m no trained interpreter of dreams, mine or anyone else’s, but I recognize the way in which they are kin to allegory, so I’m attentive and curious about them and in the same moment wary of any single interpretation of their deeper meaning.
I’ve returned to this dream many times over the years because it has always struck me as oracular. It is, once recalled, consistently vivid in memory; and although it’s true that, as our lives unfold we come to understand that we’re not required to respond whenever something calls for our attention, this dream has been calling my name for something like forty years now, and I must ask why. When I began making notes for this essay, this dream came at me like a loosed arrow, hitting the bole of a tree with a ringing thud. For me, the arrow quivering in the tree trunk was a simple, imperative sentence: Tell the dream. Now.
If you will bear with me, then, and forgive the conceit that the dream carries something worth unpacking in these emergency times, I’ll proceed with it.
IN THE FIRST MOMENTS of the dream, a middle-aged man with a thick head of hair, wearing some sort of rough-woven caftan cinched at the
