Paraguas and Pages
You cannot deny reality indefinitely.
Some dreams—they are warm and squishy, the kind that you want to stay wrapped in forever. Others are elaborate concoctions. My favorite are visits and ministrations from my amour.
Then there are dreams drifting in with hard truth that we didn’t realize needed telling—or maybe didn’t want to hear. cComing the way truth often does in midlife—plain, almost apologetic, dressed as nothing in particular.
Bombs in brown paper wrapping.
Tonight two dreams shape a heavy, unseen onus. In the first, I am walking in Spain with my wife and a longtime friend who has always required special attention and handling. It is an ordinary walk, the kind where you don’t see most of what you look at and instead proceed not with details, but impressions, the rhythm of the place.
On the road in this ether-vision, my beloved is angry with me. The mere suggestion that our friend will get wet sends my wife into a verbal assault insisting I go back and get an umbrella.
I don’t recall the rain, only the instruction. It is irritation that is not theatrical; it is familiar. I am needed, I am useful, only—not for myself.
It’s an important detail. Not the umbrella request exactly, but the task, the unnecessary demand.
Spain is, so many things. It is escape. It is reset. It is romance. Adventure, experience, expansion, suffering. But it is also existence, life that has to be lived. Cobblestones and movement—presence, but not yet boredom. Art needs boredom.
But before routine can introduce it, there is the distracting weight of being somewhere new. Simple things suddenly become challenging. Bus numbers, where is a train platform, how do you turn up the heat? Small things that gobble up time and brian waves.
In the dream, it is not rest. I am in motion, and doing the thing I came to Iberia for: to explore, to extract, to sup, to see, not the bricks or the cobbles, but the mortar between them and understand why it holds fast the way it does. Why does it have it's color. It's texture. The small things in life are the true treasures. Spain and Portugal have these in abundance and I am here to hold them and let them become part of me.
But, in this dream, I am not allowed to drink in and get drunk on the experience of existence. My attention is pulled away and demanded to abandon the walk and instead engage in the maintenance of another.
This is a common theme I recognize; deletion of self for the needs of others. Not ever dictated explicitly as I have seen in my dream. But self initiated for the most part as I see this as a pathway to holiness, to visibility, being accepted. I don't wish to cast my wife as a demanding harpy—though she can, at times, slip into the roll of demander.
The anger, I think, is more about my own self-implied need to victimize my existence in order to feel worthy and valued. For some reason, I only feel validated when I fade into the role of servant. Diminishing my own self and want. I define this as holiness, and feel a failure when I am not holy.
This is a strange duality: to be created with hunger and then feel guilt for wanting to eat.
The friend, too, is less herself than a placeholder. She stands in for the world’s endless, reasonable demands. Someone always needs something small and sensible, and I am very good at providing it. The dream does not accuse. It simply shows the pattern. I am walking through my own life, and my role is to leave the path in order to fetch protection for others.
I sense some quiet resentment. Not shouted anger, because it has learned that tack won’t be answered. Trudge ahead, I was born a mule, I will die a mule.
The second dream arrives like a response.
Sketchbook #66—titled Romancing Iberia—is nearly full.
There is no one else in this dream. No anger. No instructions. Just the knowledge of pages used, of attention given, of something finite approaching completion. A sketchbook is not a souvenir. It is evidence. It proves that I was not merely present in body, but awake. That I noticed light on stone, the pace of streets, the way a place reveals itself only when it is not rushed.
The number matters because it implies continuity. This is not a whim. Sixty-six sketchbooks suggest devotion, a long conversation with the act of seeing. And the title—Romancing Iberia—is not about possession. To romance a place is to court it, to listen, to allow it to change you without insisting it stay.
“Nearly full” carries both pride and ache. It means I did what I came to do. It also means this chapter has an edge. Something will end. The fear is not that it was meaningless, but that it was fleeting.
Placed side by side, the dreams speak to one another clearly.
In one, I am useful.
In the other, I am alive.
One is about assigned care.
The other is about chosen attention.
One pulls me outward, away from myself.
The other gathers me inward and says: Look. This counted.
There is no rebellion in these dreams. No explosion. Just contrast. And perhaps that is the most honest form of clarity. My mind is not asking me to abandon responsibility. It is asking me not to forget the difference between service and erasure.
The sketchbook dream does not deny the umbrella dream. It answers it.
It says: even here, even now, under obligation and compromise, something true is being filled. Page by page. Line by line. Not for approval. Not for utility. But because noticing is how I stay intact.
So the essay closes where the dream wants it to—at the back of the book, with bulletpoof ink staining my fingers and hands.
And though i am not truly there, this comes from the dream and so seems an apropos addition:
Sketchbook #67 — Closing Page
I didn’t come to take you with me.
I came to let you leave marks.
Stone warmed palms.
Lighted awe and wonder.
The grammar of walking—
the ways and alleys reveal themselves only to those
who do not hurry, who slow and press.
I loved without owning.
I watched without asking to be seen.
I sat where others passed and let the day
find the shape of me.
If I carry anything home,
it is not the place,
but the posture:
Head up.
Hands open.
Attention given freely.
I was not whole here.
But I was present.
And presence, it turns out,
is enough to fill a book.
— W
#dream #travel #madrid #iberia #romancingiberia
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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