We Don't Even Need a Reason

The urge to search my back pages hit me hard, the other night. I'd just wanted to find one old journal from my 1996 trip to Yurp, specifically since that was the period when I got it into my head that keeping a dream journal would be a real boss idea, since I have markedly vivid and odd dreams. Sure, a couple of minutes every morning to jot down some stuff. I was also doing it because I'd had a few lucid dreams around then and really enjoyed them, and wanted to see if I could generate them at will - and, of course, the first thing they recommend doing is keeping a dream journal to improve your dream recall.

The recall part worked really well. I had to give up when I found myself spending the entirety of the train ride from Rome to Vienna chronicling one fucking dream. Seriously, the entry runs something like twenty-five pages. It's the dictionary definition of out of control.

So I never did explore my lucid dreaming, but at least I have a journal, somewhere, with a few really lengthy dream entries from the mid-90's, a particularly formative period in my adult life. And the journal is what I got a bug up my ass to find the other night. And did not find, finding instead pretty much every other thing that I own and need to find both a method of filing and a place to file.

The journal itself is highly iconic as a physical object - a small hardcover, with the above Richard Estes painting wrapping around front and back cover. I hope that the iconic nature of it doesn't mean it's irrevocably lost - it does kind of seem like things that assume a near-totemic quality in my personal Animism of The Things of Dave end up disappearing for good; the small gold coin I received for my Bar Mitzvah, the little rubber erasers in the shapes of fruit that I'm convinced still lurk somewhere in my father's old (and my current) office, my glow-in-the-dark magic window, etc.

But those objects really are lost to history. The journal will, I suspect, turn up in time, but it's going to make me wait until I've finally cleaned and sorted every object I own before it does so. I had planned to copy down that really long dream in serialized form for the last few Ramblers of 2008 - a blast from far in my imaginary past - but I guess it'll have to wait. You lucky people.

D.