I have been writing down my dreams since high school. Scraps of paper, many without dates, pepper my files and journals, filling a file drawer I call “half-baked ideas”: stories that I haven’t finished, children’s books, television and film treatments that never took off or haven’t been written, an erotic novel and hundreds of poems.

After I had finished writing my first book, Ashes in the Milk, I encountered a creative pause. Not quite a vacuum but rather like the threshold of a doorway where I found myself wondering, “What’s next?”

And then I dreamed the vagabond playwright, telling me to take up my dream journals and make poetry from them, tend them, animate and eliven and walk around in them day after day into night after night until I retrieved what was lost in the underground of me, buried safely in my unconscious.

So, I did. For a year. I went dream by dream in chronological order, creating a poem for each dream. My pandemic dreams, my post-pandemic dreams.

Then the alchemy, the magic, the life of the dreams began to take shape. 106,000 words later, I had a huge, untitled manuscript. I went in search of a developmental editor who could objectively round up the themes and images and help me cut it down to size. I’m not usually good at asking for help but I asked.

I told her about my vision for the book drawn from my dreamtime and she returned with about 36,000 words accompanied by a beautifully detailed document explaining how she organized the poetry, the dream themes, into a cohesive storyline based on the Jungian framework I had roughed out with her.

I opened the manuscript and cried from happiness. She had found the cream that rose to the top of my story.

An especially curious and delightful thing happened in this, my second manuscript. When I wrote Ashes in the Milk, I cried a lot; grief and more grief, trauma upon trauma whenever I read certain parts aloud. I would choke, thinking, “I could never do a reading. I’ll wind up in a pile of tears and snot.”

With this new baby, I felt grounded. I wasn’t grieving. I was…celebrating. Celebrating being in awe of Psyche and her gifts the full-length movies she weaves every night.

Truly, dreams are postcards from God, or the gods, or from the Universe, whatever you call the force that lives within us; is bigger than us.

We need to listen.