I keep a notebook on the nightstand. This is not discipline — it is more like leaving water out for a stray. The dreams come if I don’t make too much of them, if I simply receive what arrives and write it down before the waking mind can organize it into something reasonable.
The reasonable mind is not always to be trusted. I have been a therapist for thirty-five years. I know what the reasonable mind does with difficult material. It files it. It explains it. It converts raw ore into a story that can be told at dinner, and in doing so loses the vein of gold entirely.
So I write in the dark, or nearly dark. My husband breathes beside me. The dog arranges herself at the
foot of the bed with the particular authority of small animals who have decided where they belong. And I write down what the night has given me before it dissolves — the way you cup water in your hands, knowing some will always spill, writing anyway.
This is a book built from those pages.
———
P S Y C H E
I have been waiting for you to write it down.
Not because I need the record — I have my own. But because the writing is how you learn to bear what you already know. The hand moving across the page in the dark. The dog at your feet. You think you are preserving the dream. You are practicing trust.
I am Psyche. You know who I am. You’ve known for years — you just called me by other names. The soul. The deep self. The one who keeps sending you back down.
I’ll walk with you. I won’t explain everything. Virgil didn’t explain everything either, and Dante was the better for it.
Pay attention to the map.
———
Part One: The Map
One
The dream came just before dawn, the way the best ones do.
I was in the passenger seat. My mother was driving. This alone was enough to make me want to stay — I am never the passenger; I have not been the passenger in forty years; I became the driver sometime in my thirties and never gave the wheel back — but in the dream it was entirely natural, entirely right, and I sat with my hands full of the road map and pressed it to my chest like a love letter I couldn’t stop reading.
Not reading. Holding.
The map was paper. Real paper, the kind that tears at the folds after years of use, the kind that never refolds the way it came. It had been opened and closed a thousand times and still held the creases of every journey, and I pressed it against my sternum and felt it crinkle softly when I breathed and thought:
we are going. We are actually going.
My mother drove the way she drove when I was young, with the particular confidence of a woman who had learned to navigate before anyone thought to ask if women should. She didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. The road moved under us and the trees along the highway grew taller as we went, then taller still, and I understood without being told that we were going toward the redwoods — toward something old enough that it had stopped caring about time the way the rest of us care about time — and I held the map and let myself be carried.
I want to say: I cannot remember the last time I let myself be carried.
When I woke I wrote it down in sixty seconds, before the dream could become something I half-remembered over coffee. Three lines. Then I lay in the grey early light and understood that I had been given something. I did not yet know its name.
P S Y C H E
Your mother is dead. I know you know this. I mention it because the dream doesn’t care, and neither do I, not in the way the waking world cares — drawing a hard line between the living and the gone as though that line were the most important fact about them.
In the country I come from, the dead drive. They know the roads. They have been everywhere you are going and they are not frightened.
She was taking you to the old trees. The ones that were here before forgetting was invented.
Hold the map. Don’t open it yet.
(you can find a ton of my work on Substack where I publish as Valerie Johns Ashes)
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