I had a dream tonight. Unlike most of the dreams I remember, it didn’t end in adrenaline and panic and running. It also, strangely enough, included real people, instead of actors playing the parts of people that I know. My dreams have always been like that – I’ll know who the image is supposed to represent, but I’ll also know (in my dream) that it’s not actually the person I feel it is.

In this dream, a friend asked me to meet him after work. This involved maps and driving and ending up at a cabin in the woods, snow crunching under my feet as I got out of the rental car and walked toward the house. I know that the trees were evergreens, that the sky was clear even though the snow was still crisp and powdery, and that the house was a dark reddish color, though it was yellow on the inside – yellow paint, or yellow light, or something. A faded kind of yellow, not sunny and bright, but something that reminded me of age. There was a big porch, and people every where. I wandered around, saying hello to his family, who’d never met me before, and didn’t know where he was. I smiled a lot, and walked around the property. There were people cooking in the kitchen and arguing in that way that you know they love each other as much as they love being loud and energetic. Too many opinions about how to cook something, and the older woman trying to get everyone else out of her way.

I was wearing dark jeans and dark grey snow boots and a grey jacket that went down past my hips and had a hood I didn’t keep up. I remember brushing snow off of it later in the dream. At some point I fell asleep in the snow, because I woke up, dusted the snow off me, and kept looking. A few minutes later a truck pulled up and a couple of guys piled out of it – I was standing on the porch and he walked up to meet me. Snow fell from his shoes as he climbed the wooden steps. I remember looking down at his hands and seeing he was holding a lit cigarette – in my dream I thought, “He doesn’t smoke,” and then thought it was one of those bad habits you pick up with disreputable cousins. When the weekend’s over, you put those things aside and we pretend it didn’t happen.

He took me toward the back of the house, to where another small porch sat off the back kitchen door, introducing me to people along the way. More smiling. We sat down on the floor, with him on my right, and me sitting with my back to the railing. I could see other people walking around, looking at us but not coming over to join in the conversation. My friend began excitedly telling me about what he’d been building with his cousins, the reason he’d made me wait so long. It was some kind of clockwork contraption, though I never saw it. At one point, while he was sitting there, smiling, gesturing with his hands – still lit cigarette in his left hand – he mentioned that he’d had to fold up a piece of paper to make a kind of bellows balloon, to blow air into the machine, and he pulls out this folded map from his jacket pocket. It’s creased  every inch or so, a pattern radiating out from the center, where he’d torn a small hole.

I remember thinking, “That’s my map. I’m going to need that to get back.” But I didn’t say anything.

People kept walking by, and I mentioned that he was ignoring the others to tell me about his machine, but he said that he’d be expected to say hello to me and tell me what he’d been doing, since I drove all the way up there. He said he knew what he was doing.

I watched him go back to his family, smile and chat and smooth hurt feelings. They all went to go eat and I was left on the back porch, looking out at the snow and the trees.

But I kept the map.

______

I don’t need to interpret the dream. I know what it means. What interests me is the details. When I woke up, the scenes still fresh in my head, I thought over what stood out to me. Aside from the feelings, which are difficult to put into words, there were the tiny moments of texture, color, objects. They supported the scene and made it all-together more real. The crunch of the snow, the colors of the house, the sun in the sky, the green needles on the tree … I knew where I was, what time of year it was, what kind of place I was in. My friend’s smile, the movement of his hands, and other details I didn’t need to mention here, all made it clear who he was, even if he he hadn’t looked like himself. The cigarette, the creases in the map, the playful argument in the kitchen – details.

The story was simple but the extra bits of information made it memorable, at least to me.

When I write I try to remember the details. The color of the sheets, the texture of a picture frame – they don’t change the story but they add to the feeling of place. My best stories are ones where I can imagine having lived in their world, because the sense of place identity is made stronger through the accumulation of detailed objects and sensory information. On the other hand, I never want to get so overloaded with expositional description that I spend 300 pages talking about a particular, comfortable, chair.

Next time you have a dream, try to hold on to the details, and then write them out when you wake up. You might see it in a new way.