Desire

She appeared in my dream in the early morning hours after an already full night of dreaming. This hour or so of sleep seems to me an unfocused time when consciousness starts to assert its presence but sleep has not relinquished psychic control. My dreams here are always brief and close to the surface and possess a reality that approaches that of the daylight hours. 

But she was not merely in the dream: she was the dream. She was why I dreamt. And it felt true to be in her company, to be not so much with her but with her in that room. It was she and the room that composed the dream. No dialogue took place. I recall that she smiled, and though it was I who watched her with some expectation, I remember nothing but a patient calm. The space was vaguely familiar, an odd conflation of rooms painted by Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Hopper, but this room conveyed no sense of threat nor cold; the colors were warm earth tones. In fact, I cannot locate the space at all; it was no place with which I am familiar. I stood in the door leaning casually on the jams looking in at her who lay on the large bed fully clothed wearing a flowered peasant dress, her head resting on her crooked arm, and a knowing, warm smile on her face. But there was no invitation in her look, and on my part no inclination to move towards her in any sexual manner. I could say that the room was the womb to which I have tried too desperately to return with little success, thankfully, but that would turn the girl into my Mother when in fact neither she nor my feeling reminded me at all of her. Nor did I feel enclosed by the room; in fact, in that space at that moment I felt as I do on certain summer days when the temperature of the air is so perfect that there exists no resistance to it and I do not move through the air but am one with it. 

That was the entire dream. And when I awoke from the dream I felt fulfilled and prepared. I think that it was Desire I had seen in my dream. Because that is, I think, who she was: my desire. She was lovely and inviting, exciting and unthreatening. It was lovely to see Desire, but she would not be had, in fact. She was without judgment, but what she offered to me was warm comfort and acceptance. I felt at peace in her presence; she lay on the bed but did not invite me to it. I didn’t care. Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood? 

I do not meet my desire out here in the waking world—to see it I must dream it—but out here I am free to place it somewhere—and then, so situated, it leads me forward, as Abraham must have felt his Desire and departed from Ur. Upon awakening I experienced a certain peace: it was time to see the dawn. 

Who was she? The girl from the red river shore? Dylan says that “Sometimes I think no body ever saw me here at all except the girl from the red river shore.” Desire allows us presence, and no one ever sees us except our desire. And maybe we only see our desire. I am glad she was so pleasant to view.