Last night, I had the strangest dream. Strange in a good way this time, to the extent that I didn’t want to wake up and shake it off even though it had already jumped the shark, as dreams do.

I was in some caverns under, I believe, Virginia as part of a Smithsonian boat tour I had already taken, so I felt confident enough to jump out in an area that I considered my favorite to do some additional exploring. At that point, I stumbled into a beautiful series of chambers that happened to be occupied by my next-door neighbors. In real life, I have two sets of next-door neighbors, one good and one evil. These were the good ones, who happen to be really too old to be stumbling around in caverns, but in the dream, they knew the tunnels like the back of their hands and over their lives had frequently come to this spot I had only just discovered.

During the course of talking with them, I learned that the husband was actually a reclusive writer of the J.D. Salinger sort, except his opus was not Catcher in the Rye but (I’m not kidding) Alvin and the Chipmunks, and he looked upon this literary creation with both pride and chagrin. But to his wife and legions of fans, he was considered a pure modern genius, and so many people wanted to learn at his feet that he went into hiding, both as my mild-mannered neighbor and more literally in these caves under Virginia.

As the dream continued, I learned that the wife was a literary genius, too, and though I spent much time speaking with her spouse and learning his secrets, she was the one who ended up taking me under her wing and insisting that I get serious about my writing. To that end, she forced me to sit in a boat that circled through three of the beautiful caverns with only a notebook for companionship. Whenever I passed her, I would yell out excuses as to why I couldn’t write a word, and she would order me to get over it, and eventually, when my excuses ran out, I did and started writing beautiful prose the likes of which the world has never seen. Obviously this was a dream, both because of the beautiful prose and the fact that I could read my own handwriting.

That was the best part of the dream, floating in circles in my beautiful subconscious, unabashedly basking in the joy and flow of creation, no excuses, no problems, no self-editing.

Of course, knowing me, this could not go on for very long, and the dream ended with me taking the husband to a store that sold both lamps and car washes, and walking through the car wash part with him. He was perfectly happy with this turn of events, and I was just wet.