IN LIKE A LION PART 1: CHAPTER 2
In Like a Lion
Maps, myths, and manifestations
(a memoir)
BROWSE CHAPTERS
Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5
CHAPTER 2
of dreams of campfires
Soundtrack: Listen While You Read
There is a highway that curves away from the city towards the coast on the southern border of a land whose name hides upon the tip of your tongue. The dream begins as a map splayed out across your vision, growing, morphing with your descent. You’re flying in, almost low enough to see the cracks in the pavement when the scene levels off and evens out around you, trees and buildings slowly moving backwards on the other side of the car window.
Your hands rest casually on the steering wheel as you slow down for a red light. The passenger seat is empty. The sparsely populated countryside is dotted with old houses and motels longing for tourist season. Everything within these foreign environs—sky, clouds and horizon—is tinged brown and green. The air isn’t of a place undiscovered but of a time untouched.
The highway ends at the main intersection of a small beach town. Turning right cuts you off from civilization entirely, westwards into the wild, all the way to a forested trailhead and an old stone wall. Here you find yourself accompanied by a faceless friend beneath a cerulean canopy so thick it seems to cast an artificial light, the sun shimmering and sparkling through green lantern leaves above the deep, cavernous maw of ancient tree trunks.
Back on the highway, turning left takes you across the border through town. Carefully, you navigate the steep hills and sharp curves as you grip the steering wheel of your small car. Quaint structures grow taller around you as the harbor comes into view. You stop, gazing at the foreboding horizon, certain that this eastward path lies before you ripe and open. Unlike the westbound highway that led to the forest path, this place isn’t at all warm or comforting. It feels odd here, surprising, like the hidden messages within your favorite childhood stories decoded as an adult.
(Starts at 1:11)
David Lynch is a legendary dream translator,
creating intensely moody and surreal experiences through the art of film.
In this video, Lynch shares his philosophy of ideas
and our subjective interpretations of them.
Audience: “I watched Mulholland Drive and still don’t know what any of it meant.”
Lynch: “You do know, though. You really do.”
If you don’t believe dreams mean something, pause and look at the clothes you’re wearing right now. There’s a good chance that you’re wearing an item that might not exist without one man’s journey through his own dreamland. Ruled by a savage king, the soldiers inhabiting this realm bore spears pierced near the head: a design that proved to be the final piece of Elias Howe’s sewing machine invention, which he successfully completed a few hours after waking up.
Descartes famously fathered the scientific method, inspired by a series of dreams. Without these, he may never have paved the path still walked by scientists—gatekeepers of objective, tangible data—almost five hundred years in the future. There are countless examples of dreams inspiring monumental achievements (perhaps you already know the origin story of the periodic table of the elements). But the most fascinating might be the confounding chemical makeup of benzene, discovered by the scientist Friedrich August Kekulé, thanks to his unconscious encounter with the ouroboros: a snake swallowing its own tail.
Ouroboros (Mausolée Goblet d'Alviella)
The topic of dreams tends to confound because there are so many different interpretations, none of which can be “proven,” necessarily… What exactly are we seeing when we see a place no one else can see? Who or what is uttering that which we’ve never before heard? The science around the topic is inevitably boring. It might stand up for itself; it might inform; but the medium doesn’t do justice to the esoteric experiences we undergo within the subconscious realm.
There is a certain type of dream that stands out to me. Not some random reorganization of hopes, fears or memories; it is its own place/time marked by a startling realism: an eerie connection has been made that relies not only upon the world of the dream itself, but from my instant recognition. I’ve known this place as long as I’ve known myself. It’s not just that I’ve been looking for it: it’s the surprise of realizing that I’ve been looking for it for as long as I can remember.
Hence, my solo maiden voyage to Kentucky in April, 2019.
*****
I wasn’t sleeping much. My full-time office job, not to mention our three-year-old, dominated the entirety of my days. I needed to retreat. Around February, I began planning a trip to an exotic city, maybe Montreal or even Cartagena, to decompress, people-watch and finally knock out my novel.
One night, grabbing the five or six hours of sleep that I could before another day of sedentary busy work, I dreamt of a campsite: a blue tent set in the shadows of looming conifers with a smoky bonfire in the center. Soon the dream took on that ominous, cinematic quality and I was on the road, behind the wheel, watching a colorful, sparkling city emerge ahead through the dirty glass of the windshield, glistening like Oz, a rural Atlantis lost to the land of the living. I was bitten by that sudden familiarity, the discovery of something I had long been searching for without realizing it. The image, pure and clear, seared permanently into my memory.
As the scene dissolved in a wave of dissonant voices and images and my body slowly became conscious of cool bed sheets brushing against skin, I had a clear realization that the dream was a direct and specific reference to Kentucky. The surprise of this added to the dream’s significance. I had never explored Kentucky (despite its proximity to Nashville) outside of a few forgotten childhood trips to Murray and Paducah. I cracked open my eyelids, squinting in the early morning sunlight amplified by the full length mirror, and a rush of adrenaline hit me: there’s a vast, unexplored world of mountains, rivers and woods right in my backyard! I sat up with a little boy’s grin and declared to my fiancé: “I’m going to rent a car and explore Kentucky for my writer’s retreat. Two nights in the woods, one night in the city.”
“Kentucky? Why?” she replied, stretching and rubbing her eyes after another oft interrupted night’s sleep, as the toddler began crying from the other room.
“It came to me in a dream,” I replied half-jokingly, still grinning like a dummy.
“You should,” she said after a pause, smiling and putting her hand on my shoulder. She was worried about me, I could tell.
I booked the entire four-day weekend later that day: two state park cabins, one at Pine Mountain and one at Natural Bridge, and a basement apartment in Louisville. Two months later, grinning the same grin, I hurtled down the Cumberland Parkway out of Glasgow towards Somerset and I-75, charcoal clouds canvasing the sky through the windshield, long stretches of empty country on all sides. My dream had come to life.
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Writing prompts:
Have you ever had a dream that came to life, whether through déjà vu or otherwise?
What is your favorite dream sequence from a television or film production?
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