Messages from Dreamworld

All night long, the dream voices kept chanting a phrase in my sleeping ear: “The Company We Keep.” It sounded like a catchy title to a book and I followed it into dreamworld imagining offering it up to today’s popular authors I’ve been reading— Jo Jo Moyes, Krsitin Hannah, Britt Bennet, Ann Patchett, Kelly Rimmer (note, all women!)— with a little note: “Here’s the title. Now all you have to do is write the book.” And then a P.S.—“If it becomes a New York Times Bestseller (and the title alone suggests it will), you can pay me back by getting me a literary agent for my books. Deal?”

 

So when I woke up this morning, I wondered if someone had already written a book with that title. And lo and behold, there was a movie called “The Company You Keep” with Robert Redford that I had seen and another “The Company We Keep” that I hadn’t. Was the dream suggesting I should watch them both? What does it all mean?

 

Perhaps the most important point is that in a world that we want to control, in a life that we want to be wholly in charge of, there are still mysterious other voices talking to us in a language we can’t quite comprehend and in the end, don’t need to analyze and assign literal meaning. We just need to listen and marvel that life keeps throwing out breadcrumbs on the trail without signposts as to where they lead. If we pay attention and follow, something interesting may happen. 

 

The day awaits and I have my plans for it. What plans does it have for me?